Dados do Trabalho

Título

Dedicated Spinopelvic Measurement Software: a Look into the Usage Trend Among a Panel of Spine Surgeons

Objetivo

This study investigates the familiarity of surgeons in using dedicated spine software and whether specific software training can motivate surgeons using surgical planning tools.

Metodologia

A survey-type study included Brazilian spine surgeons who attended an ASD instructional course in February 2019. During this educational course, there was a training workshop on using dedicated spine software for radiographic measurements and surgical planning. Two weeks after the course, an online questionnaire was sent (Survey Monkey, San Mateo, CA, USA) to the
spine surgeons who attended the training workshop.

The questionnaire was designed to assess the surgeons' training background, characteristics of their clinical practice, and whether they use dedicated surgical planning software to obtain radiographic measurements of ASD patients. The questionnaire also addressed the workshop outcomes and motivated the surgeons to start using this measurement/planning tool. Eight
questions composed the survey; the average time needed to answer the questionnaire was two minutes.

The data were analyzed with R, version 3.4.9 (R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria). The normality of the continuous variables was verified with the Shapiro-Wilk test. Unpaired t-tests were used to assess the differences in the means. For the categorical variables, Fisher's exact test was used to compare distributions. The level of significance was set
to be 0.05

Resultados

A total of 39 surgeons answered the questionnaire: 38 orthopedic surgeons and one neurosurgeon. On average, the responders had 10.5 years (± 5.6) of experience, and the years of experience varied from one to 20 years. The answers to the questionnaire are summarized in Table 1. Most surgeons (56%)had little experience in treating ASDs, as they performed fewer than five surgeries per month. Given the low number of respondents, the ASD Volume variable groups were rearranged from 4 to 2. The 0 to 2 and 2 to 5 were merged into a 0 to 5 group comprising the low-medium volume. The same occurred with the 5 to 10 and 10 to 20 merged into a 5 to 20 group comprising medium-high volume surgeons.
The majority of the responders (61.5%) had no experience with dedicated spine software before training. The responders with previous software usage experience had significantly fewer clinical experience years (mean: 7.7±5.6 vs. 12.3± 4.9 years, p = 0.01, Figure 2). There was a significant difference in the number of ASD surgeries performed per month
between surgeons with experience using the software and surgeons groups without experience (p = 0.01). The surgeons who performed more than five ASD surgeries per month were 7.73 times more likely than the surgeon.

Conclusões

This study demonstrates that surgeons who have fewer years of experience and perform more ASD surgeries are more likely to be already familiar with and use dedicated spine software in clinical practice