Routine recovery room radiographs after total hip arthroplasty: ineffective for screening and unsuitable as baseline for longitudinal follow-up evaluation.

To assess the usefulness of traditional recovery room check radiographs after total hip arthroplasty, we retrospectively analysed 2,065 consecutive hip arthroplasty patients. We found a 0.1% rate of radiologic diagnosis of dislocation in the population screened. In 100 patients randomly selected for comparison, the image quality in the recovery room radiographs was significantly inferior to standardized departmental radiographs (P<.001), with further significant differences between cup version (P<.001), and stem alignment assessments (P=.002). We found good agreement between the authors in the assessments of these radiographs with a weighted kappa statistic of 0.8653 (P<.0001). Seven recovery room radiographs needed repetition for poor quality versus none of the departmental films (P=.007). With such poor information and diagnostic yield for follow-up and screening, these investigations should only be performed when clinically indicated.