Study Design, Setting, and Participants

Patients who underwent revision surgery between August 2019 and September 2020 at the Department of Orthopedic Surgery, Aarhus University Hospital, were included in the study. The removed orthopedic implants were collected, irrespective of the anatomic location (shoulder, knee, hip, elbow, and ankle), type of implant (plates, screws, liners, nails, and prostheses), or indication for revision (hardware irritation, dislocation of implant, suspected, or overt infection). Processing of all implants was performed at the Department of Biomedicine, Aarhus University. A priori, it was decided to include 100 implants in the study. At the discretion of the surgeons, for some patients, tissue samples for culture were sent to the Department of Clinical Microbiology, Aarhus University Hospital. Tissue culture results, when available, were accessed from the patient’s records. They were considered positive, if two or more of the five tissue cultures showed growth of the same bacteria. Informed consent was obtained from 85 patients to access data from the patient’s record. The study was registered with Region Midtjylland with reference number 661624. The Central Denmark Region ethical committee waived the need for ethical approval. Patient data were collected and managed using REDCap electronic data capture tools hosted at Aarhus University (Harris et al., 2019).