Lateral vs. Supine Positioning for Femoral Intramedullary Nailing: A Systematic Review of Comparative Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Femoral shaft fractures are devastating injuries that usually result from high-energy mechanisms in victims of poly-trauma. Reamed and statically locked intramedullary nailing (IMN) is the definitive treatment modality for femoral shaft fractures. Patients are most commonly positioned either supine or lateral decubitus. There remains considerable concern regarding the safety of lateral positioning in the traumatized patient, particularly in the management of a potentially difficult airway or concomitant C-spine injuries. We therefore undertook a systematic review of intraoperative positioning among patients with femoral shaft fractures following PRISMA guidelines. Title and abstract screening, full text screening, and data abstraction were all completed in duplicate. Methodological Index for Nonrandomized Studies (MINORS) scores were used to evaluate methodological quality. Results: 3018 studies were included in initial screening, with three studies ultimately meeting all inclusion criteria. A total of 1,949 patients were analyzed, with 684 patients treated in lateral positioning and 1,215 patients in supine positioning. Level of agreement was strong across title (κ = 0.872; 95% CI 0.794 to 0.951), abstract (κ = 0.801; 95% CI 0.585 to 1.000), and full-text screening (κ = 1.000). The consensus mean MINORS score of included studies was 17.67 ± 0.58, indicating good to high quality of evidence. Neither patient positioning offered obvious benefits such as fewer complications or shorter operative time. Furthermore, length of admission, days in ICU or on ventilator, and overall morbidity were not found to be significantly different between positions. Lateral positioning for intramedullary nailing of mid-shaft femur fractures appears to be a safe alternative to the standard supine positioning. There is a lack of both prospective and retrospective comparative studies investigating functional clinical outcomes in the literature.
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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 | 0.028 | 0.108 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".