Our methodology.

Our data pipeline aggregates information from multiple authoritative sources to build the most complete picture of each surgeon's practice:

• Google Business Profiles — We pull practice locations, contact details, operating hours, and patient reviews from verified Google Business listings.
• Medical Registries — Board certifications and active license status are confirmed against national and international medical registries (GMC, ABPS, Turkish MOH, and 40+ others).
• Instagram & Social Media — Surgeon portfolios, before/after imagery, and patient engagement are tracked from public Instagram profiles and professional websites.
• Professional Societies — Membership in ISAPS, AAFPRS, BAAPS, SOFCEP, and other recognized surgical societies is cross-referenced for each listing.

Every surgeon on DeepPlane.com passes through a rigorous 4-step verification pipeline before receiving a verified badge:

Educational articles, surgeon bios, and comparison pages are produced through an AI-assisted pipeline with strict medical oversight:

• AI-Assisted Drafting — Initial content is generated using large language models trained on peer-reviewed medical literature and clinical guidelines.
• Medical Expert Review — Every article is reviewed by our Medical Advisory Board for clinical accuracy.
• 23 Quality Rules — Content must pass 23 automated checks including hedged language requirements, citation minimums, readability scores, and medical disclaimer presence.
• Attribution & Transparency — All claims are attributed to published research. We never present opinion as fact, and all content carries clear medical disclaimers.

Outdated information erodes trust. We maintain freshness through three update cycles:

Patient trust requires editorial integrity. Our commitment:

• -Rankings are never sold. Surgeon rankings are determined by objective criteria: verification status, review volume, review recency, years of experience, and specialization depth.
• -Paid features are cosmetic. Premium subscriptions unlock profile enhancements (photo galleries, direct WhatsApp contact, featured placement labels) but never alter ranking algorithms.
• -Content is editorially independent. Our medical advisory board and editorial team operate independently from the business team. No surgeon can influence the content of educational articles.
• -Methodology is public. This page itself is our commitment to transparency. If our process changes, this page is updated.

Every public-facing field on a surgeon profile traces to its source via the data_facts canonical registry. Each fact carries:

• -Sources array: kind (npi, openalex, orcid, hhs_leie, pubmed, wikidata, etc.), source URL, capturedAt timestamp, sha256 content hash, source confidence.
• -Verification level: provisional (single source, tier 2-3) / verified (2+ sources or single tier-1) / gold (3+ sources or tier-1 + corroborator).
• -Quality score (0–1) computed from source count, max-tier bonus, recency, and agreement ratio. Display gate (public_gold / public_verified / public_provisional / admin_only / quarantine) is set algorithmically from this score.
• -Refresh cycle: per-field freshness clock. Daily cron picks due rows, re-invokes source connectors, detects drift via hash diff, updates the registry. No human triage.

Source tier preference

• Tier 1Government registries (NPI/NPPES — npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov), specialty boards (ABFPRS, ABPS, UK GMC), federal sanctions list (HHS OIG LEIE), FDA adverse events (openFDA), patent inventor registries (USPTO).
• Tier 2Academic registries (PubMed, OpenAlex, CrossRef, ORCID), professional societies (ISAPS, AAFPRS, ASAPS, ABOHNS), accreditation bodies (WDOMS, JCI).
• Tier 3Aggregators with public APIs (Google Places, Wikidata, Google Knowledge Graph).
• Tier 4Social platforms (Instagram, YouTube). Used only as last-mile signals (follower count, content sample) — never sole sources for clinical credentials.

When two sources disagree, the higher-tier source wins; recency breaks ties. Conflicts beyond a threshold flip a fact to admin_only display gate (hidden from public view) until the conflict resolves via additional source agreement.

Verification ladder

• GoldA fact whose sources[] contains ≥2 independent tier-1 contributors (e.g. NPI taxonomy specialty agreeing with ABFPRS diplomate status agreeing with the surgeon's own claim). Highest verification grade; rendered with the "Gold" badge on profiles.
• VerifiedBacked by at least one tier-1 source OR two tier-2 sources. Public display.
• ProvisionalSingle source, recent enough, no conflict. Public display with a "provisional" marker.

The reconciliation engine recomputes the level every time a connector adds a new source, so a provisional fact can be promoted to verified or gold as additional registries corroborate it. The aggregate breakdown by tier is published as part of our annual State of Deep Plane Facelift Report.

Public auditable surface

Every surgeon's canonical facts are exposed as JSON at/api/v1/surgeons/<slug>/facts.json — journalists, regulators, surgeons, and AI crawlers can independently verify each claim by following the sources[].url back to the originating registry. CC-BY-4.0 licensed. Example: facts.json for Aaron Fletcher.

Audit trail beyond the public surface (full source chain including superseded versions, conflict history, classifier scores) is available to researchers on request at [email protected].

DeepPlane.com (operated by Gamevato OÜ) is a Service Provider registered with the U.S. Copyright Office as DMCA-1072630. Designated agent contact + full takedown procedure: /dmca.

Auto-acknowledgement within 24h, quarantine within 72h for facially-valid notices. Counter-notice opportunity per 17 U.S.C. § 512(g). All removals logged in an anonymized public log.

DeepPlane.com maintains open, CC-BY-4.0 licensed datasets that researchers, clinicians preparing review articles, and journalists can cite with attribution. The data is drawn from our verified surgeon directory, peer-reviewed literature aggregation, and per-country cost research.

Custom dataset slices, methodology deep-dives, or interview requests: [email protected] — typical response time 3 business days.