Thoracic Outlet Syndrome International Collaborative Contact Find a TOS center
Home/About/About the collaborative

About the collaborative

TOSIC exists because thoracic outlet syndrome is diagnosed, coded and treated differently in almost every country — and because that variation is measurable, and therefore fixable.

Mission & vision

Standardise the description of TOS, then improve its treatment.

Thoracic outlet syndrome sits between specialties. A patient may be seen by a vascular surgeon, a thoracic surgeon, a neurologist, a physiotherapist or a pain clinic, and each discipline records the condition in its own language. The result is a literature made largely of single-center series that cannot be pooled.

The collaborative was founded to remove that obstacle. Our first task is a shared vocabulary: agreed subtype definitions, an agreed minimum dataset, and agreed outcome measures. Our second is to use that vocabulary — through a shared registry and multicenter studies — to answer the questions individual centers cannot answer alone.