Point of care ultrasonography in patients with haemophilia and acute haemarthrosis: a physiotherapist and sonographer inter-professional agreement pilot study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Haemophilia treatment centres (HTCs) around the world are increasingly adopting point-of-care ultrasonography (POCUS) for the assessment of acute haemarthrosis and to monitor joint health. POCUS is in large part administered by physiotherapists in most comprehensive care teams. Appropriate implementation of haemophilia-specific POCUS requires an educational foundation and training to ensure competency and optimal outcomes. Inter-professional agreement and evaluation of image quality are important measures of competency and acceptable use of POCUS. Aims To determine the level of agreement between physiotherapist and sonographer-performed POCUS scans and to compare the quality of the ultrasound images obtained by physiotherapists to those obtained by the sonographer. Methods This single blind, prospective, pilot study recruited patients with haemophilia A and B who presented to clinic with a suspected acute haemarthrosis of the elbow, knee, or ankle and consented to participate. POCUS scans were performed by one trained physiotherapist and one sonographer in the haemophilia ambulatory clinic at patient presentation, one-week follow-up, and two-week follow-up. The physiotherapist participated in formal training consisting of 12 hours of online didactic modules and a two-day, 12-hour practical module with instructor-led hands-on training. For the primary objective, the outcome of interest was the binary decision on the presence or absence of blood within the joint. For the secondary objective, image quality was evaluated by the radiologist post hoc and rated as optimal, acceptable, or sub-optimal. Results Thirteen participants with haemophilia consented to the study. The results indicated an excellent level of agreement (k=0.80) with an observed agreement of 91.7%, a specific positive agreement of 94.1%, and a specific negative agreement of 85.7% for the detection of blood within the joint space. The quality of the ultrasound images obtained by the physiotherapist were rated by the radiologist as optimal (84.6%) and acceptable (15.4%). None of the images were rated as sub-optimal. Conclusion Optimal image quality and a high level of agreement between the physiotherapist and sonographer-performed POCUS for the assessment of acute hemarthrosis in people with haemophilia A and B was observed. These results suggest that, with a short formal training programme, physiotherapists can be proficient in the performance, acquisition, and interpretation of POCUS scans in patients with haemophilia.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".