Overview Indications: Breast surgery, pain management after thoracic surgery or rib fractures Landmarks: Spinal process at the desired thoracic dermatomal levels Needle insertion: 2.5 cm lateral to midline Target goal: needle insertion 1 cm past the transverse process Local anesthetic:…
This installment of ‘statistics in small doses’ goes hand-in-glove with the previous – Does (sample) size matter? We need not wade through sample size formulae as these are readily available in software online;1-3 rather, we will touch upon factors that…
On May 12, 2016 the three Duke Regional and Ambulatory Anesthesia fellows, Evan Sutton, Irfan Samee, and Siddharth Sata visited Belgium for a week long observership as part of the newly established fellowship exchange program with NYSORA – CREER in Genk, Belgium. They visited three different sites during the trip including the ZOL hospital where Dr. Admir Hadzic leads the NYSORA – CREER fellowship, the KU-Leuven University hospital in Leuven, and an off-site orthopedic surgery center that is part of KU-Leuven.
Many commercial software programs can handle all but the most esoteric statistical tests with simple clicks on a computer keyboard. There are even YouTube videos that show which buttons to click and when. Unfortunately, there is little emphasis on the reasoning that must be applied when choosing among the array of procedures that might be appropriate to address a study’s specific research objectives, and there is almost no mention of the importance of quality data collection and management. This month’s Statistics in small doses draws on actual examples from a recent review of study protocols and papers, and serves as a recap of previous “doses.”
Inconsistent time points at which measurements are taken Correlation between measures taken at different time points become less meaningful A measure of limb functionality may be obtained from POD1 thru POD7, but a measure of postoperative pain may be obtained…
In research, the value reflecting ‘no effect’ is usually 0 or 1.0. So, like traditional significance testing, if 0 or 1.0 is inside the confidence interval (CI), there is no significant difference between the treatments. If 0 or 1.0 is…