Malpractice litigation in diagnostic radiology with special focus on cases in the abdomen and pelvis: A comprehensive analysis from a national legal database
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Diagnostic radiology is regarded as a "high-risk" specialty in the medical malpractice literature. This study examines the causes and patterns and types of medical malpractice litigation and outcomes in radiology in the United States, with a particular focus on diagnostic radiology errors involving the abdomen and pelvis. METHODS: Malpractice suits in which the defendant was a radiologist in the United States from 2008 to 2018 were identified using LexisAdvance, a national legal database. 2775 cases were initially identified, and 1165 cases fit the inclusion criteria. RESULTS: Diagnostic error was the most prevalent error type, (n = 925, 82.9 %), followed by procedural errors (n = 106, 9.5 %), communication errors (66 cases, 5.9 %), and mixed/other errors (n = 19, 1.7 %). Breast was the most common imaging modality implicated in medical error (n = 211, 26.4 % of total cases), followed by CT (n = 186, 23.3 %), and XR (n = 146, 18.3 %). Out-of-court settlement was the most common outcome (n = 402, 44.5 %), followed by a verdict ruled in favor of the defendant (n = 246, 27.2 %) and case dismissal (n = 131, 14.5 %). The average award in a settlement was $1,500,690 USD (range: $25,000- $10,200,000 USD). The average award in a jury verdict for the plaintiff was $2,857,203 USD (range: $60,000- $31,490,000 USD), and the average award in arbitration for the plaintiff was $1,354,497 USD (range: $200,000- $2,800,000 USD). The gastrointestinal (GI) system and the genitourinary (GU) system accounted for 51.9 % and 25.9 % of errors in the abdomen and pelvis, respectively. DISCUSSION: Diagnostic error was the most prevalent source of error leading to malpractice litigation. Breast imaging was the most frequently implicated imaging modality in litigations, followed closely by CT and XR. A majority of cases were resolved through out-of-court settlement or with judgments in favor of the defendant radiologists. However, in cases with trial judgments in favor of the plaintiff, average financial awards were higher than out-of-court settlements. Abdomen and pelvic involvement accounted for frequent sources of error.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it