Ventricular Shunting for Hydrocephalus in Children: Patients, Procedures, Surgeons and Institutions in English Canada, 1989 - 2001
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION AND PURPOSE: Ventricular shunting remains the principle and most generally applicable method to treat hydrocephalus in children. This paper describes the demographics of this treatment in English Canada during the period of 1989 to March 2001. METHODS: Hospital discharge records were obtained for patients less than 18 years who had a shunt inserted or revised. A database was constructed relating patients and procedures to hospital discharges based on scrambled patient identifiers, year of birth, sex, postal code and diagnoses. OBSERVATIONS: 5,947 patients underwent ventricular shunting procedures for hydrocephalus in this period. 261 surgeons working in 73 institutions provided 12,106 interventions (Shunt insertions: ventriculoperitoneal--5009, ventriculoatrial--119, ventriculopleural--28. Revisions: 6,950). Infection was deemed to have occurred in 1,059 procedures. Over the study period, the median number of procedures performed per surgeon per year was 2, with 75 % of surgeons performing 5 or fewer procedures in children per year. Although many surgeons operated on children throughout the thirteen years of the study, many did not acquire substantive cumulative experience. Overall infection rate was 8.6 %. Surgeon infection rates were greater than or equal to 20 % during the first four years of practice and thereafter they fell to and remained in the 10 % range. The mean shunt survival at 12 months of individual surgeons varied between 50 - 60 %, regardless of the number of years of experience of the surgeon; however, performance variability as measured by the standard deviation of 12 month survival rates for all surgeons, adjusted for years of experience, ranged widely until the fifth year of practice. The average number of procedures per year for treating hospitals was 2 with 75 %, providing 12 or fewer services annually. Over the entire study, 50 % of institutions provided 10 or fewer procedures. The mean institutional infection rate was 11.4 % (SD 23, median--6.0). CONCLUSIONS: Quality monitoring of infection rate and duration of shunt function remains critical as many surgeons and hospitals provide care to children with hydrocephalus infrequently. Variability in infection rates and shunt survival at 12 months are a function of surgeon experience, measured by years in practice. Variability in outcome decreases with increasing surgeon experience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".