Absolute and relative reliability of lumbar interspinous process ultrasound imaging measurements

Abstract

[Purpose] The intra- and inter-examiner reliabilities of lumbar interspinous process distances measured by ultrasound imaging were examined. [Subjects and Methods] The subjects were 10 males who had no history of orthopedic diseases or dysfunctions. Ten lumbar interspinous images from 360 images captured from 10 subjects were selected. The 10 images were measured by nine examiners. The lumbar interspinous process distance measurements were performed five times by each examiner. In addition, four of the nine examiners measured the distances again after 4 days for test-retest analysis. In statistical analysis, the intraclass correlation coefficient was used to investigate relative reliability, and Bland-Altman analysis was used to investigate absolute reliability. [Results] The intraclass correlation coefficients (1, 1) for intra-examiner reliability ranged from 0.985 to 0.998. For inter-rater reliability, the intraclass correlation coefficient (2, 1) was 0.969. The intraclass correlation coefficients (1, 2) for test-retest reliability ranged from 0.991 to 0.999. The Bland-Altman analysis results indicated no systematic error. [Conclusion] The results indicate that ultrasound measurements of interspinous process distance are highly reliable even when measured only once by a single person.

The reliability of video fluoroscopy, ultrasound imaging, magnetic resonance imaging and radiography for measurements of lumbar spine segmental range of motion in-vivo: A review

“…A total of 17 studies were eligible for this review [23,[26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41]. Table 5 summarises the data extracted and Table 6 summarises the findings.…”

“…Six studies used VF to measure ROM [28,[33][34][35]38,40], five used radiography [26,27,29,30,32], four articles used US imaging [23,36,37,39], and two citations investigated MRI [31,41]. However, Chleboun et al [23] also included MRI results as a gold standard comparator for US.…”

“…Most studies involved only healthy participants [23,26,28,[36][37][38][39][40], whereas some had a mixture of symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals [33][34][35]41] and others studied specific populations [27,[29][30][31][32]. These included participants with LBP [27,31], spondylolisthesis [32], monosegmental degenerative disc disease [29] and monosegmental total disc replacement [30].…”

“…Articles measured segmental ROM during flexion and/ or extension [23,27,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]38]. Others investigated flexion, extension and side flexion [28,40], two studies [37,39] quantified motion of the lumbar spine from three static positions; whilst one study looked at neutral positioning and lateral bending motion [26].…”

“…The psychometric properties of each modality analysed varied between reliability [23,[26][27][28][29][30][32][33][34][35][38][39][40][41] or a combination of reliability and validity [31,36,37]. All but five studies [26][27][28][29][30] used intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) as a metric of reliability.…”