OBJECTIVE To rank 39 surgical procedures in order of variation of inpatient surgical rates, according to a new index of variation and to test the hypothesis that there is greater variation for primarily discretionary operations than for primarily non-discretionary operations. DESIGN A population-based retrospective cohort study. SETTING Nine provinces (99.19% of Canada's population). PART...

Research on surgical interventions is associated with several methodological and practical challenges of which few, if any, apply only to surgery. However, surgical evaluation is especially demanding because many of these challenges coincide. In this report, the second of three on surgical innovation and evaluation, we discuss obstacles related to the study design of randomised controlled trial...

Virtual reality has been used in planning and executing various surgical procedures. Technical competence is the bedrock of surgery and virtual reality is the modern tool to assess and improve this competence. These methods are more cost effective and safe. Orthopaedic surgery is based on imaging and hence, can be strongly influenced by the concept of virtual reality. High performance computing...

Recent advancements in robotics technology have allowed more complex surgical procedures to be performed using minimally invasive approaches. In this article, we reviewed the role of robotic assistance in Otolaryngology and Head and Neck Surgery. We highlight the advantages of robot-assisted surgery and its clinical application in this field.

Clinical outcomes are commonly monitored in healthcare practices to detect changes in care providers' performance. One key challenge in outcome monitoring is the need of adjustment for patient base-line risks. Various control charting methods have been developed to conduct risk-adjusted outcome monitoring, but they all rely on the availability of a large number of historical data. We propose a ...

Until recently, insufficient attention has been paid to the fact that surgical interventions are complex. This complexity has several implications, including the way in which surgical interventions are described and delivered in trials. In order for surgeons to adopt trial findings, interventions need to be described in sufficient detail to enable accurate replication; however, it may be permis...

We collect in this paper several results on the formation of singularities in the mean curvature flow of hypersurfaces in euclidean space, under various kinds of convexity assumptions. We include some recent estimates for the flow of 2-convex surfaces, i.e. the surfaces where the sum of the two smallest principal curvatures is positive everywhere. Such results enable the construction of a flow ...

background :the present study was conducted to establish the patterns and risk factors of surgical site infections in our institution between 2006 and 2011.   methods: this was a retrospective cross-sectional study. the surgical site infection (ssi) was identified based on the presence of icd-10-cm diagnostic code in hospital discharge records. by using a standardized data collection form predi...