Interrater variability in manual palpation of the medial femorotibial joint of Warmbloods and American Quarter Horses based on experience level
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Background Manual palpation of the equine medial femorotibial joint (MFT) is commonly performed during lameness evaluation. Previous studies have shown poor inter‐observer agreement between experienced clinicians and between stifle effusion palpation and ultrasonography. No study has been performed that has evaluated palpation agreement of the MFT based on low to high experience levels nor comparing two different breeds. Objectives To compare inter‐ and intra‐observer agreement between palpation and ultrasound in assessing effusion and joint capsule thickening of the MFT in two breeds. Study design Observational cross‐sectional. Methods Sixteen Quarter Horse and 16 Warmblood MFT were manually palpated for effusion and joint capsule thickening by three faculty members, three house officers and three fourth‐year veterinary students. Ultrasound of the MFT was performed and images were reviewed by a boarded radiologist. Stifle effusion and joint capsule thickening were graded on manual palpation and ultrasound images using 0–5 and binary scales. Interrater reliability was performed with the intraclass correlation coefficient for agreement by means of a 2‐way model. Spearman rank correlation was used to examine associations between palpation scores for each observer and ultrasound scores. Significance was set at p < 0.05. Results Interrater reliability for palpation of MFT effusion and joint capsule thickening was poor between all observers, regardless of experience level. No significant correlation was identified between palpation and ultrasound scores for any observer or between breeds. Main limitations Only two breeds were compared. Participants were chosen based on availability and may not accurately represent all experience levels. Conclusions Palpation of the MFT was highly variable, regardless of experience. Compared to ultrasound, manual palpation had no significant correlation, indicating low accuracy. These results were consistent across all experience levels and breeds, suggesting that palpation alone should not be relied upon to quantify effusion or joint capsule thickening in the MFT.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".