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Introduction: Early involvement and research in neurosurgery can increase chances for medical students to matriculate successfully into residency. This study reports the creation of a Neurological Surgery Interest Group (NSIG) at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and shares its activities over 2 academic years., Methods: In October 2014, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine's NSIG was created to augment medical student interest in neurosurgery. The group consisted of 4 appointed officers for a membership base of 100 students. In June 2015, a neurosurgery resident and faculty member joined as mentors. A research committee of 14 medical students was created to conduct collaborative research projects with the department. In August of 2015 and 2016, surveys were sent out to the research committee regarding research productivity., Results: The NSIG hosted 17 medical student-oriented events over 2 years, including didactic and suturing workshops, senior faculty panels, postmatch talks, and a neurosurgery networking dinner. A survey of students about scholarly achievement in neurosurgery reported 17 accepted publications in peer-reviewed journals with a mean impact factor of 3.5 ± 2.5. Ten abstracts were submitted to the 2015 and 2016 American Association of Neurological Surgeons Scientific Meetings, with a 100% acceptance rate. An increase in the number of students matching from our institution into neurosurgery residencies was observed following the group's inception., Conclusions: An NSIG can be mutually beneficial to both medical students and an institution's neurosurgical department. This study's findings may be applied to numerous specialties and across various academic institutions., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background and Objective: An important component of the residency application for neurosurgery is research experience and the subsequent number of produced publications. Bibliometrics research has been developed to establish quantitative methods for the standardization of publishing impactful research. This study aims to quantify the research productivity of medical students who successfully matriculated into a Neurosurgery residency program., Methods: We initially identified first-year neurosurgery residents for the 2016-2017 academic year of all U.S. neurosurgical residency programs through departmental websites. The Scopus database was then queried for all articles published in the years 2006 to 2015 by first-year residents and bibliometric variables, such as publication count, journal impact factors, and author h-index, were extracted. The main outcome measured was residency program, tiered 1-5 by total departmental faculty research output., Results: Two hundred six (206) Scopus records for first-year neurosurgery residents were identified in 99 programs nationwide. Multivariate ordinal regression demonstrated that only h-index was independently associated with tier of matriculation (P = 0.043). H-index was observed to strongly correlate with the number of original research articles (P = 0.005), years since first publication (P < 0.0001), and journal impact factor (P = 0.048) as assessed by multiple linear regression. Notably, h-index was observed to increase by approximately 1 point with every 3 original research articles (B = 0.368) and 4 years since first publication (B = 0.257)., Conclusions: H-index is a powerful research predictor of matching into neurosurgical research institutions and can be improved by starting research early, targeting high impact journals, and participating in original clinical and laboratory investigations., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Study Design: A retrospective review.Objective: This study aimed to determine the factors associated with malpractice litigation in cases involving spine surgery in the United States.Summary Of Background Data: Medical malpractice is of substantial interest to the medical community due to concerns of increased health care costs and medical decision-making for the sole purpose of reducing legal liability.Methods: The Westlaw online legal database (Thomson Reuters, New York, NY) was searched for verdict and settlement reports pertaining to spine surgery from 2010 to 2015. Data were collected regarding type of procedure, patient age and gender, defendant specialty, outcome, award, alleged cause of malpractice, and factors involved in the plaintiff's decision to file. Initial search queried 187 cases, after which exclusion criteria were applied to eliminate duplicates and cases unrelated to spine surgery, yielding a total of 98 cases for analysis.Results: The verdict was in favor of the defendant in 62 cases (63.3%). Neurosurgeons and orthopedic surgeons were the most common defendants in 29 (17.3%) and 40 (23.8%) of the cases, respectively. A perceived lack of informed consent was noted as a factor in 24 (24.4%) of the cases. A failure to diagnose or a failure to treat was noted in 31 (31.6%) and 32 (32.7%) cases, respectively. Median payments for plaintiff verdicts were nearly double those of settlements ($2,525,000 vs. $1,300,000). A greater incidence of plaintiff verdicts was noted in cases in which a failure to treat (P < 0.05) was cited, a patient death occurred (P < 0.05), or an emergent surgery had been performed (P < 0.01).Conclusion: Overall, physicians were not found liable in the majority of spine surgery malpractice cases queried.Level Of Evidence: 4. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Patients are increasingly turning to online resources to inquire about individual physicians and to gather health information. However, little research exists studying the online presence of neurosurgeons across the country. This study aimed to characterize these online profiles and assess the scope of neurosurgeons' digital identities. Methods Medicare-participating neurologic surgeons from the United States and Puerto Rico were identified using the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Physician Comparable Downloadable File. Each physician was characterized by his or her medical education, graduation year, city of practice, gender, and affiliation with an academic institution. Using a Google-based custom search tool, the top 10 search results for each physician were extracted and categorized as 1 of the following: 1) physician, hospital, or healthcare system controlled, 2) third-party or government controlled, 3) social media–based, 4) primary journal article, or 5) other. Results Among the physicians within the CMS database, 4751 self-identified as being neurosurgeons, yielding a total of 45,875 uniform resource locator search results pertinent to these physicians. Of the 4751 neurosurgeons, 2317 (48.8%) and 2434 (51.2%) were classified as academic and nonacademic neurosurgeons, respectively. At least 1 search result was obtained for every physician. Hospital, healthcare system, or physician-controlled websites (18,206; 39.7%) and third-party websites (17,122; 37.3%) were the 2 most commonly observed domain types. Websites belonging to social media platforms accounted for 4843 (10.6%) search results, and websites belonging to peer-reviewed academic journals accounted for 1888 (4.1%) search results. The frequency with which a third-party domain appeared as the first search result was higher for nonacademic neurosurgeons than for academic neurosurgeons. Conclusions In general, neurosurgeons lacked a controllable online presence within their first page of Google Search results. Third-party physician rating websites constituted about half of the search results, and a relative lack of social media websites was apparent. Still, numerous opportunities exist for neurosurgeons to address this disparity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]