Publications by authors named "Ida L Gitajn"

Significance: The arterial input function (AIF) plays a crucial role in correcting the time-dependent concentration of the contrast agent within the arterial system, accounting for variations in agent injection parameters (speed, timing, etc.) across patients. Understanding the significance of the AIF can enhance the accuracy of tissue vascular perfusion assessment through indocyanine green-based dynamic contrast-enhanced fluorescence imaging (DCE-FI).

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Introduction: There is a lack of research on the state of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in the emerging orthopedic trauma workforce. The purpose of this study was to analyze the training pathway for diverse candidates in orthopedic trauma as it relates to race, ethnicity, and sex.

Methods: Self-reported demographic data were compared among allopathic medical students, orthopedic surgery residents, orthopedic trauma fellows, and the general population in the United States (2013-2022).

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Background: Fracture-related infection is one of the most challenging complications in orthopaedic trauma surgery. However, the effect of infection on functional and pain-related outcomes has not been well established. The aims of this study were to evaluate functional recovery for patients with fracture and a deep surgical site infection compared with patients with fracture without infection and to evaluate whether pain severity, social support, and preinjury mental health have a moderating effect on the magnitude and direction of the relationship between deep surgical site infection and functional recovery.

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Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard to establishing causal relationships in clinical research. However, these studies are expensive and time consuming to conduct. This article aims to provide orthopaedic surgeons and clinical researchers with methodology to optimize inference and minimize bias in observational studies that are often much more feasible to undertake.

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: Implant-associated infection in orthopaedic surgery remains an enormous and largely unsolved clinical problem with a high rate of persistent or recurrent infection. This may be due, at least in part, to the potential for underdiagnosis by traditional microbial culture or the potential for culture to incompletely identify the microbial species present.

: Nucleic acid-based diagnostic techniques, focused on using the diagnostic information contained in DNA or RNA to identify microbial species, have been developing rapidly and have garnered escalating interest for both clinical and research applications.

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Bone devitalization is believed to be a critical determinant of complications such as infection or nonunion. However, intraoperative assessment of bone devitalization, particularly in open fractures and infections, remains highly subjective resulting in variation in treatment. Optical imaging tools, particularly dynamic contrast-enhanced fluorescence imaging, can provide real-time, intraoperative assessment of bone and soft tissue perfusion, which informs the tissues' ability to heal and fight infection.

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Importance: Racial disparities in treatment benchmarks have been documented among older patients with hip fractures. However, these studies were limited to patient-level evaluations.

Objective: To assess whether disparities in meeting fracture care time-to-surgery benchmarks exist at the patient level or at the hospital or institutional level using high-quality multicenter prospectively collected data; the study hypothesis was that disparities at the hospital-level reflecting structural health systems issues would be detected.

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High-energy orthopedic injuries cause severe damage to soft tissues and are prone to infection and healing complications, making them a challenge to manage. Further research is facilitated by a clinically relevant animal model with commensurate fracture severity and soft-tissue damage, allowing evaluation of novel treatment options and techniques. Here we report a reproducible, robust, and clinically relevant animal model of high-energy trauma with extensive soft-tissue damage, based on compressed air-driven membrane rupture as the blast wave source.

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Objective: To systematically review outcomes of the Masquelet "induced membrane" technique (MT) in treatment of tibial segmental bone loss and to assess the impact of defect size on union rate when using this procedure.

Data Sources: PubMed, EBSCO, Cochrane, and SCOPUS were searched for English language studies from January 1, 2010, through December 31, 2019.

Study Selection: Studies describing the MT procedure performed in tibiae of 5 or more adult patients were included.

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Importance: In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many hospital systems were forced to reduce operating room capacity and reallocate resources. The outcomes of these policies on the care of injured patients and the maintenance of emergency services have not been adequately reported.

Objective: To evaluate whether the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with delays in urgent fracture surgery beyond national time-to-surgery benchmarks.

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Dynamic contrast-enhanced fluorescence imaging (DCE-FI) classification of tissue viability in twelve adult patients undergoing below knee leg amputation is presented. During amputation and with the distal bone exposed, indocyanine green contrast-enhanced images were acquired sequentially during baseline, following transverse osteotomy and following periosteal stripping, offering a uniquely well-controlled fluorescence dataset. An unsupervised classification machine leveraging 21 different spatiotemporal features was trained and evaluated by cross-validation in 3.

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Purpose Of Review: The purpose of this manuscript is to review the current diagnosis, management, and referral practices of patients with osteoporosis after a fragility fracture from the orthopedic surgeon's perspective.

Recent Findings: Effective treatments are available for osteoporosis that significantly decrease the risk of additional fractures. Despite recommendations for improved post-fragility fracture osteoporosis management, the rate of diagnosis and treatment is still unacceptably low.

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Introduction: Fracture-related infection (FRI) represents a challenging clinical scenario. Limited evidence exists regarding treatment failure after initial management of FRI. The objective of our investigation was to determine incidence and risk factors for treatment failure in FRI.

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Introduction: Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) provide data on the effect of conditions and treatments on patients' lives without third party interpretation. Mounting evidence suggests that PROs may be useful in elective procedure decision making, but its utility in trauma remains unclear. Longitudinally collected PROs may prove effective in identifying patients recovering below the norm.

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Objectives: To determine whether skin perfusion surrounding tibial plateau and pilon fractures is associated with the Tscherne classification for severity of soft tissue injury. The secondary aim was to determine if soft tissue perfusion improves from the time of injury to the time of definitive fracture fixation in fractures treated using a staged protocol.

Design: Prospective cohort study.

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Introduction: Traditional physical therapy (PT) requires patients to attend weekly in-office supervised physical therapy appointments. However, between 50% and 70% of patients who would benefit do not receive prescribed PT due to barriers to access. Virtual Reality (VR) provides a platform for remote delivery of PT to address these access barriers.

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Objective: The aim of this study was to assess applicant and fellowship director (FD) perspectives on virtual interviewing based on the 2019 to 2020 orthopaedic trauma fellowship interview experience and to develop recommendations for future application cycles.

Methods: Web-based surveys were distributed to all matched applicants and orthopaedic trauma FDs after the 2019 and 2020 orthopaedic trauma fellowship match. Thirty-one applicants and 23 FDs completed the survey-response rates of 34% and 38%, respectively.

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Introduction: Symptoms of stress, depression, and burnout are prevalent in medicine, adversely affecting physician performance. We investigated real-time measurements of physiological strain in orthopaedic resident and faculty surgeon volunteers and identified potential daily stressors.

Methods: We performed a prospective blinded cohort pilot study in our academic orthopaedic department.

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Background: We sought to evaluate whether tourniquet use, with the resultant ischemia and reperfusion, during surgical treatment of an open lower-extremity fracture was associated with an increased risk of complications.

Methods: This is a retrospective cohort study of 1,351 patients who had an open lower-extremity fracture at or distal to the proximal aspect of the tibia and who participated in the FLOW (Fluid Lavage of Open Wounds) trial. The independent variable was intraoperative tourniquet use, and the primary outcome measures were adjudicated unplanned reoperation within 1 year of the injury and adjudicated nonoperative wound complications.

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Introduction: Patients who sustain orthopaedic trauma are at an increased risk of venous thromboembolism (VTE), including fatal pulmonary embolism (PE). Current guidelines recommend low-molecular-weight heparin (LMWH) for VTE prophylaxis in orthopaedic trauma patients. However, emerging literature in total joint arthroplasty patients suggests the potential clinical benefits of VTE prophylaxis with aspirin.

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Significance: Extremity injury represents the leading cause of trauma hospitalizations among adults under the age of 65 years, and long-term impairments are often substantial. Restoring function depends, in large part, on bone and soft tissue healing. Thus, decisions around treatment strategy are based on assessment of the healing potential of injured bone and/or soft tissue.

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We describe the novel quantitative lesser trochanter profile (QLTP) technique to determine the magnitude and direction of femoral malrotation and to compare its performance with the cortical step sign technique. For this assessment, 9 orthopaedic surgeons estimated the magnitude and direction of femoral malrotation with each technique in 198 anteroposterior view images of the proximal cadaveric femur and osteotomy sites. Based on the results, the main benefit of the QLTP technique over the cortical step sign technique is the ability to determine the direction of femoral malrotation.

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Significance: The effects of varying the indocyanine green injection dose, injection rate, physiologic dispersion of dye, and intravenous tubing volume propagate into the shape and magnitude of the arterial input function (AIF) during intraoperative fluorescence perfusion assessment, thereby altering the observed kinetics of the fluorescence images in vivo.

Aim: Numerical simulations are used to demonstrate the effect of AIF on metrics derived from tissue concentration curves such as peak fluorescence, time-to-peak (TTP), and egress slope.

Approach: Forward models of tissue concentration were produced by convolving simulated AIFs with the adiabatic approximation to the tissue homogeneity model using input parameters representing six different tissue examples (normal brain, glioma, normal skin, ischemic skin, normal bone, and osteonecrosis).

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Objective: To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of screw fixation versus hemiarthroplasty for nondisplaced femoral neck fractures in low-demand elderly patients.

Methods: We constructed a Markov decision model using a low-demand, 80-year-old patient as the base case. Costs, health-state utilities, mortality rates, and transition probabilities were obtained from published literature.

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