Differences in Practice Patterns in the Use of Temporary External Fixation for the Management of Open Lower-Extremity Fractures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: External fixation is often used in the management of open lower-extremity fractures. The objectives of this study were to identify hospital characteristics that are associated with greater use of temporary external fixation and to determine if external fixation reduces the odds of surgical site infection (SSI) and unplanned reoperation among patients with open lower-extremity fractures. METHODS: This is a secondary analysis of the Aqueous-PREP and PREPARE-Open trials involving open lower-extremity fractures. Wilcoxon rank-sum and Fisher exact tests were used to assess if temporary external fixation use varied between hospital clusters. Mixed-effects logistic regression models controlling for hospital cluster and participant characteristics estimated the associations between temporary external fixation and SSI or unplanned reoperation. RESULTS: There were 2,438 patients with an open lower-extremity fracture identified, with 568 (23.3%) undergoing temporary external fixation. There were 34 participating hospitals with a median external fixation rate of 21.5%. Hospitals with higher temporary external fixation use had a higher number of surgeons treating patients with fracture (p = 0.02). There was no difference in SSI at 90 days (odds ratio [OR], 1.16 [95% confidence interval (CI), 0.82 to 1.66]; p = 0.40) or 1 year (OR, 1.30 [95% CI, 0.97 to 1.75]; p = 0.08) between patients who did and did not undergo temporary external fixation. Patients who underwent temporary external fixation were more likely to have unplanned reoperations within 1 year (OR, 1.40 [95% CI, 0.96 to 1.79]; p = 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: More temporary external fixation for open lower-extremity fractures was performed at hospitals with more surgeons treating fractures. There was no difference in SSI at 90 days or 1 year between patients who did and did not undergo temporary external fixation. Temporary external fixation tended to be used in more critically ill patients and patients with more severe fractures but was not associated with increased unplanned reoperations at 90 days or at 1 year. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Therapeutic Level II. See Instructions for Authors for a complete description of levels of evidence.
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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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".