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Chest Wall Deformities and Corrective Procedures pp 35–60Cite as

Indexes for Pectus Deformities

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Abstract

A thoracic index is a formula used to qualify or quantify a thoracic deformity and in some cases, to define strategies within treatment. It is also a diagnostic tool used historically to assess the severity of the defect. There is no definition, classification, or consensus in the literature on which thoracic index is the gold standard. There are also no guidelines regarding cut-off values. This chapter is an effort to put all this together, starting by defining thoracic indexes, proposing a classification and describing them in detail for the first time. The main objective is to find out which are the most commonly indexes used by chest wall malformation experts worldwide, and why. For this reason the present chapter includes a web-based survey made to the aforementioned experts in order to review this issue in detail. Since there is currently no thoracic index without limitations, perhaps the perfect index is a mathematical combination of several different indexes. Perhaps it is one single index still to be discovered. This is the first step to search for a universal thoracic index for surgical – decision making.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Surgery, Fundacion Hospitalaria Children’s Hospital, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Marcelo Martinez-Ferro MD

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  1. Marcelo Martinez-Ferro MD
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Correspondence to Marcelo Martinez-Ferro MD .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Consultant Cardiothoracic Surgeon, The Heart Hospital UCLH , London, United Kingdom

    Shyam Kolvekar

  2. Aarhus University Hospital, Associate. Professor, Department of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery, Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus, Denmark

    Hans Pilegaard

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Martinez-Ferro, M. (2016). Indexes for Pectus Deformities. In: Kolvekar, S., Pilegaard, H. (eds) Chest Wall Deformities and Corrective Procedures. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23968-2_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23968-2_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-23966-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-23968-2

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