A survey of bridging bone on chest radiography shows a greater than expected prevalence of marginal syndesmophytes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The recognition of thin marginal spinal syndesmophytes is important, in part due to their association with non-traumatic or mildly traumatic vertebral fractures. PURPOSE: To determine a lower limit on the prevalence of marginal spinal syndesmophytes using chest radiographs. MATERIAL AND METHODS: We conducted a retrospective analysis of 500 chest radiographs, assessing the prevalence of thin marginal syndesmophytes, bridging or near-bridging osteophytes, and flowing paravertebral ossifications in the thoracic intervertebral discs among individuals aged 16 years and older in a North American city. RESULTS: Among the 500 participants, we observed that thin vertical marginal syndesmophytes were present in 17 (3.4%) cases, bridging or near-bridging osteophytes were present in 126 (25.2%) cases, and flowing paravertebral ossifications were present in 37 (7.4%) cases. Out of the 17 participants with thin marginal syndesmophytes, 10 exhibited a bamboo-like spine appearance, defined as the presence of ≥4 contiguous levels of bridging marginal syndesmophytes. Analysis of syndesmophyte distribution per vertebral level indicated a higher frequency of involvement in the mid to lower thoracic spine, maximal at T9/10. CONCLUSIONS: The presence of thin marginal syndesmophytes in the thoracic spine on routine chest radiographs is substantially more prevalent than would be anticipated based on the existing literature. The feasibility of reliably identifying these syndesmophytes in the spine and the impact of this on morbidity should be further investigated due to their association with advanced ankylosing spondylitis and their susceptibility to fractures.
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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) | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".