European spine journal : official publication of the European Spine Society, the European Spinal Deformity Society, and the European Section of the Cervical Spine Research Society
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The choice of instruments for the assessment of outcome in spinal surgery is bewildering. For day-to-day practice, however, consideration of the purpose for which information is required allows construction of simple strategies for data collection. Recommendations are made for short and convenient data sets for use in personal audit, clinical governance, benchmarking, patient selection and business planning. No simple data set can measure in detail every aspect of practice, but use of these recommendations will provide information that will be of great value to the spinal surgeon and ultimately to his patients.
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Historical Article
Compliance of the L5-S1 spinal unit: a comparative study between an unconstrained and a partially constrained system.
A comparison between an unconstrained and a partially constrained system for in vitro biomechanical testing of the L5-S1 spinal unit was conducted. The objective was to compare the compliance and the coupling of the L5-S1 unit measured with an unconstrained and a partially constrained test for the three major physiological motions of the human spine. Very few studies have compared unconstrained and partially constrained testing systems using the same cadaveric functional spinal units (FSUs). ⋯ The unconstrained system is today's "gold standard" for the characterization of FSUs. The selected partially constrained method seems also to be an appropriate way to characterize FSUs for specific applications. Care should be taken using the latter method when the coupled motions are important.