Author response to: Comment on: Intraoperative bowel perfusion assessment methods and their effects on anastomotic leak rates: meta-analysis

Dear Editor

We thank Li et al. for their correspondence and are grateful for their comments highlighting that our systematic review¹ makes a significant contribution to existing literature on this important topic. However, we wish to provide the following response to some of their other points.

As highlighted in the methods section of the review, detailed information on the study design may be found on the PROSPERO website (https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/) where the study was registered (CRD42021297299). Further details may also be found in the supplementary material published with the review, including a comprehensive data set of the data extracted from each of the included studies. Details of our assessment of study bias are already included in the review; this was performed using the recommended MINORS criteria.

We agree that our analysis does not account for individual operator use. However, the included studies come from a wide range of countries and will therefore reflect a range of practices. A detailed assessment of operator use was not within the scope of this review and would be an appropriate area of future research. Similarly, although a comparative cost analysis of the various techniques would be very informative, at present there are insufficient published data on this topic and it was considered outside the scope of this review. Further research should aim to evaluate the health economic benefits of such technologies to enable a proper objective comparison.