Clinical signs of infection during continuous postoperative epidural analgesia in children: the value of catheter tip culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Infection arising from the use of epidural catheters for postoperative analgesia is a major source of anxiety. METHODS: The routine culture of epidural catheter tips were studied in 100 consecutive children aged 1 day to 15 years. Epidural catheters were inserted aseptically in accordance with an agreed protocol. The catheter site was inspected regularly and the tip sent for microbiological culture following removal. RESULTS: Local signs of inflammation at the epidural site were seen in 16% of children, and bacteria were isolated from catheter tip culture in 32%. Positive catheter tip culture was found in 43% of children with local signs of inflammation and of the remaining children with no local signs, organisms were isolated from the catheter tip in 30%. Culture of skin swabs and catheter tips in two patients with purulent discharge at the epidural site yielded the same organism. No correlation between the number of attempts at catheter insertion and either local signs of inflammation or positive catheter tip cultures were found. CONCLUSIONS: Minor local signs of inflammation and infection are common in pediatric patients during continuous epidural infusion. Epidural catheter tips are also frequently culture positive in patients with and without local signs and who may not go on to develop further signs or symptoms of infection. Routine culture of catheter tips is unnecessary as it is not a good predictor of epidural space infection.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".