Enrico Martin

239 Current attitudes towards function preservation Methods Study design and survey instrument A survey was constructed by two authors (E.M. and J.H.C.) and tested internally with all co-authors from different surgical subspecialties. A secure electronic data capturing tool (REDCap) provided by the Dutch Plastic Surgery Society (NVPC) was used to construct the survey. This study is part of a larger survey addressing both surgical and non-surgical treatment considerations for localized MPNST. A total of 22 questions (30 in total) were used for this study, of which seven were demographic. The complete survey can be found in Supplementary File 1 of Chapter 5 . Approval for this study was obtained from our institutional review board. Study population Several surgical societies were asked to distribute the survey link by email among their members with an accompanying text explaining the purpose of the research. Anyone involved in the surgical management of MPNSTs was asked to fill out the survey. A reminder email was sent thereafter. The survey was sent to the members of the Dutch Society of Surgical Oncology (NVCO), the Dutch Society for Surgery of the Hand (NVVH), the peripheral nerve section of the Dutch Society for Neurosurgery (NVVN), the American Society for Peripheral Nerve (ASPN), the peripheral nerve section of the European Association of Neurosurgical Societies (EANS), and the Soft Tissue and Bone Sarcoma Group of the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC). Survey responses were filled out anonymously and no person identifying data was inquired. Statistical analysis Responses were summarized per surgical subspecialty: surgical oncology, neurosurgery, plastic surgery, and other surgical subspecialties. Differences were calculated with χ 2 -tests for categorical data; for continuous data either unpaired student t-tests (two groups) or one-way analysis of variance tests (more than two groups) were used. P-values <0.05 were considered statistically significant. Statistical analyses and data visualization were conducted using R version 3.6.0 (R Core Team, 2019). 10