MRI Quantification of the Impact of Ankle Position on Syndesmosis Anatomy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Despite the common occurrence of syndesmotic injuries in ankle trauma, the distal tibiofibular relationship remains poorly understood. The aim of this study was to evaluate the anatomical impact of ankle sagittal positioning on the tibiofibular relationship in intact ankles by using a validated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based measurement system. METHODS: In this radiologic study, 34 healthy volunteers underwent a series of ankle MRIs with the ankle stabilized in 3 positions: neutral position (NP), dorsiflexion (DF), and plantarflexion (PF). Using a previously validated measurement system, 6 fixed translational measurements and 2 fixed angles were recorded on each MRI and compared using paired t tests. RESULTS: When comparing PF to DF, the anterior distance between the tibial incisura and the fibula varied from 2.5 mm to 3.9 mm ( P < .001), respectively. The middle distance between the tibial incisura and the fibula varied from 1.5 mm to 2.6 mm ( P < .001). Fibular angle varied from 8.7 degrees to 7.8 degrees of internal rotation ( P = .046), respectively. When comparing NP to DF, only the anterior distance was found to be significantly different, varying 0.4 mm ( P < .002). CONCLUSIONS: Ankle dorsiflexion leads to an increase in external rotation and lateral translation of the fibula. These changes could be measured on MRI using a validated measurement system. Ankle motion did have an impact on the distal tibiofibular relationship and should be considered in studies pertaining to syndesmosis imaging. CLINICAL RELEVANCE: This is the first in vivo study demonstrating the impact of sagittal ankle position on the distal tibiofibular relationship in an uninjured ankle. Our findings also support the practice of placing the ankle in dorsiflexion when fixing a disrupted syndesmosis. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Level III, comparative study.
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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 | 0.000 | 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".