Assessment of Acute Abdominal Pain: Utility of a Second Cross-sectional Imaging Examination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: To retrospectively determine how often a second cross-sectional imaging examination provides useful additional information or alters management of acute abdominal pain. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The research ethics board approved this study; the informed consent requirement was waived. Authors assessed imaging reports and clinical charts of adult patients who presented to the emergency department and underwent both computed tomography (CT) and ultrasonography (US) of the abdomen within 72 hours. A total of 255 patients fulfilled study criteria. The second examination was categorized as providing additional useful information, providing no additional useful information, or providing contradictory information. It was also noted whether the second examination was recommended because of findings of the first and whether the results of the second altered clinical management. Follow-up was available in 149 patients, and a definitive diagnosis was established. For these patients, it was determined whether either examination favored the correct diagnosis. Fisher exact test, one- and two-sample tests for equality of proportions with continuity correction, and the chi(2) test were used, where appropriate. RESULTS: In 85 patients (33.3%), findings of the second examination agreed with those of the first examination and provided additional information. In 153 patients (60.0%), findings of the second examination agreed with those of the first examination and provided no additional information. In 17 patients (6.7%), findings of the second examination were contradictory to findings of the first examination. The percentage of follow-up CT examinations that provided no additional useful information was significantly lower when recommended by the radiologist (38%) than when recommended by someone else (72%, P < .001). The percentage of follow-up US examinations that provided no additional useful information was significantly lower when recommended by the radiologist (42%) than when recommended by someone else (74%, P = .003). In the 149 patients in whom a final diagnosis was available, both sets of scans were correct in 87 patients (58.4%); only the second set of scans was correct in 43 (28.8%). Overall, findings of the second examination led to a change or could have led to a change in treatment of 23 patients (9.0%). CONCLUSION: A second examination is significantly more likely to be useful when performed because of radiologist recommendation.
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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) | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".