Time to Surgical Treatment for Metastatic Spinal Disease: Identification of Delay Intervals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
STUDY DESIGN: Retrospective cohort study. OBJECTIVES: Minimizing delays in referral, diagnosis and treatment of patients with symptomatic spinal metastases is important for optimal treatment outcomes. The primary objective of this study was to investigate several forms of delay from the onset of symptoms until surgical treatment of spinal metastases for patients with and without a known preexisting known malignancy. METHODS: All patients receiving surgical treatment for spinal metastases in a single tertiary spine center were identified. Referral patterns were reconstructed and the total delay was divided into 4 categories: patient delay (onset of symptoms until medical consultation), diagnostic delay (medical consultation until diagnosis), referral delay (diagnosis until referral to spine surgeon) and treatment delay (referral spine to surgeon until treatment). These intervals were compared between patients with and without a known preexisting malignancy. RESULTS: The median total delay was 99 days, patient delay 19 days, diagnostic delay 21,5 days, referral delay 7 days, treatment delay 8 days and diagnosis and treatment delay combined 18,5 days. No difference in total delay was observed between patients with and without a known preexisting malignancy. Total delay was not significantly associated with patient age, sex, oncological history, tumor prognosis and spinal level of the tumor. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with symptomatic spinal metastases experience considerable delays, even after metastatic spinal disease has been diagnosed, regardless of a preexisting malignancy. By identifying and eliminating the causes of these delays, diagnosis, referral and treatment may be expedited leading to improved patient outcome.
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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".