OBJECTIVE: To examine the manual measurement of the Cobb angle between professionals with different experiences of Orthopedics and Traumatology and Spine Surgery, to see if there are differences in the evaluation of radiographs of patients with idiopathic scoliosis intra- and inter-observer, and it's influence in the treatment and follow-up of these patients. METHODS: We used for this study, 22 radiographs of the thoracolumbar spine, posterior-anterior in patients with idiopathic scoliosis, and regularly monitored at the outpatient clinic of the Spine Group of the Hospital São Paulo. The exams were evaluated by four different categories of professional orthopedists and spine surgeons and made the measurement of scoliotic curves by the method of Cobb. End-vertebrae of the curves were not previously marked. Only the principal curves were measured (considered the highest value angle) of each radiograph. The reproducibility of measurements made by different observers (inter-observer) and between the two measurements of each observer (intra-observer) was analyzed by intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). RESULTS: We observed on the measures of angles, excellent concordance between assessments intra-observer and observed excellent concordance between assessments inter-observer, since the ICC at all times remained higher than 0.75, which represents excellent reproducibility. CONCLUSION: There was excellent concordance (ICC > 0.75) in the evaluation of measurements of angles in the scoliotic curves intra- and inter-observers. At the same time, measurements showed variations of up to 13.58° intra-observer, and up to 12.72° inter-observer.
Scoliosis; Radiography; Comparative study
