Study population

Morphometric data of four-hundred eighty-seven pediatric patients (n=487) have been acquired at the Medical University of Graz, Department of Pediatric Radiology during the timeframe of 17^th August 2018 to 9^th July 2019.

Twenty-one (n=21) patients had to be excluded because of incomplete data acquisition.

Patient characteristics and acquired morphometric data are shown in Table 1.

Informed consent and ethics approval

Informed consent has been obtained for all patients between 14 and 18 years of age. The informed consent of parents has been obtained for all patients below 14 years of age.

Approval of ethics committee of the Medical University of Graz was granted.

Statistical analysis

Morphometric data for n = 466 pediatric patients have been acquired. Statistical analysis has been performed in R (© R Foundation for Statistical Computing).

Results

Preliminary results have shown a very good correlation of thorax circumference to patient weight (R² = 0,907, p < 0.01) (see Figure 4). Predictions of patient weight using thoracic circumference are shown in Boxplots (see Figure 5).

In patient group below 10 kg (see Figure 6) scattering of predicted values was high due to lack of enough patients in this category (n=24) (see Figure 7).

Data suggest thorax circumference could be a feasible surrogate parameter for patient weight.