Department of Spondyloorthopedics and Biomechanics of the Spine, Poznan University of Medical Sciences, Poznań, Poland.
Department of Computer Science and Statistics, Poznan University of Medical Sciences, Poznań, Poland.
J Foot Ankle Res. 2022 Sep 7;15(1):67. doi: 10.1186/s13047-022-00572-1.
The intra-rater repeatability and inter-rater agreement of orthopaedics measurements are important for estimating injury risk and appropriate treatment. In clinical practice, it is often unavoidable to trust the measurements of other health professionals.
This study tested the agreement and repeatability of measurements of the dorsiflexion of the foot, dorsiflexion with 90-degrees knee flexion, and popliteal angle test in healthy adolescents performed twice by three raters differing in clinical experience. Three raters, i.e., an orthopaedics specialist (16 years of experience), a resident medical doctor in orthopaedics (4 years of experience), and a physiotherapy student (1 year of experience) measured the ankle joint dorsiflexion and the popliteal angle in 142 healthy adolescent subjects.
The student outperformed more experienced raters by displaying good repeatability for all the evaluated parameters. The orthopaedics specialist failed to replicate the measurements of the left ankle joint passive dorsiflexion and the left popliteal angle. The medical resident in orthopaedics displayed a lack of repeatability in evaluating the right ankle joint dorsiflexion with the knee joint bent. Kendall's W value for all parameters ranged 0.66-0.78, indicating a good inter-rater agreement.
The study highlights that measurements of the ankle joint dorsiflexion and popliteal angle test by different health professionals can generally be trusted. It indicates that novice health professionals could potentially evaluate such parameters in healthy subjects without a quality loss.
骨科测量的组内重复性和组间一致性对于评估损伤风险和选择适当的治疗方法非常重要。在临床实践中，通常不可避免地需要依赖其他健康专业人员的测量结果。
本研究测试了三位不同临床经验的评估者对健康青少年的足部背屈、膝关节 90 度弯曲时的背屈和腘窝角度测试进行两次测量的一致性和重复性。三位评估者，即骨科专家（16 年经验）、骨科住院医师（4 年经验）和物理治疗学生（1 年经验），对 142 名健康青少年的踝关节背屈和腘窝角度进行了测量。
学生的表现优于经验更丰富的评估者，所有评估参数的重复性都很好。骨科专家未能复制左踝关节被动背屈和左腘窝角度的测量结果。骨科住院医师在评估膝关节弯曲时的右踝关节背屈时缺乏重复性。所有参数的 Kendall's W 值范围为 0.66-0.78，表明组间一致性良好。
本研究表明，不同健康专业人员对踝关节背屈和腘窝角度测试的测量结果通常是可信的。这表明，新手健康专业人员可以在不降低质量的情况下，对健康受试者进行这些参数的评估。
