Subjective Discomfort of Vibration for Fracture Screening
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Bone Vibration as a Novel Screening Tool for Long Bone Fractures: Subjective Discomfort in Adults and Potential Tolerability in Children
IRAS ID
157178
Contact name
Amaka Offiah
Contact email
Research summary
Research Summary
When assessing an injured child, doctors must decide whether or not there is an underlying bone fracture. The best way of doing this is to take an x-ray.
In 2011, the 46,000 children attending Sheffield Children’s Hospital Emergency Department had 10,400 x-rays mainly to help diagnose fractures. Taking just the foot and wrist, 2,215 x-rays were normal with no fracture, at a cost of £119,610 for our health community alone (at tariff £54 per x-ray). This works out as a cost of approximately £12 million per year across England and Wales. Additionally, although the radiation dose is quite small, given that x-rays can cause cancer, no radiation is better than some radiation.
A bone-fracture screening method is needed that will help doctors more reliably decide which children should have an x-ray.
Vibration is used in industry to find defects such as cracks in machines and other structures. We believe that vibration can similarly find fractures in bones in children; our group has demonstrated that turkey bones with and without fracture have different vibration patterns. We have also shown that it is possible to detect signals from vibrating bones via sensors placed on the skin.
Having established the validity of this approach in turkey bones, we now propose to assess the subjective discomfort of vibration in adults with fractures and to ascertain whether or not they believe the same study could be carried out on children and if so down to what age. Results from this feasibility study will inform the design of a larger study in children and/or adults.
Our long-term goal is to develop a hand-held instrument that can be used where the injury took place (e.g. school playground) to screen for fracture and that will reduce the number of injured children having unnecessary x-rays.
Summary of Results
Bone correctly picked the 3 x-ray confirmed cases out of 13 adults who had a wrist fracture (7 healthy adults and 6 with wrist injury). None of the 6 injured adults felt that vibration would be too painful to use on injured children.
REC name
Yorkshire & The Humber - South Yorkshire Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
14/YH/1051
Date of REC Opinion
10 Jul 2014
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion