Cobb angle below the fracture. The Cobb angle is the preferred method of measuring post-traumatic kyphosis in a recent meta-analysis of traumatic spine fracture classifications. Scoliosis cases with Cobb angles between 40 and 50 degrees at skeletal maturity progress at an average of 10 to 15 degrees during a normal lifetime. Cobb angles of more than 50 degrees at skeletal maturity progress at about 1 to 2 degrees per year. Those with Cobb angle of more than 60° usually have respiratory complications. Cobb angle The Cobb angle, named after the American orthopedic surgeon John Robert Cobb (1903–1967), was originally used to measure
Degrees of freedom (statistics) the vectors of residuals are constrained to lie in a space of smaller dimension than the number of components in the vector. That smaller dimension is the number of degrees of freedom for error, also called residual degrees of freedom. Perhaps the simplest example is this. Suppose are random variables each with expected value μ, and let be the "sample mean." Then the quantities are residuals that may be considered estimates of the errors "X" − μ. The sum of the residuals (unlike the sum of the errors) is necessarily 0. If one knows the values of any "n" −