Factors determining success of the chronically instrumented unanesthetized fetal sheep model of human development: the accompanying dataset

The fetal sheep model closely mirrors the physiology of human fetal development. In addition to its high translational potential, this model is known to have some generally not reported rate of experimental failure. Here we present a dataset of outcomes in 82 experiments and the SAS code to analyze it. We show that factors such as animal characteristics & surgical complexity do not influence the experimental outcomes. Instead, the key factor in model experimental success is the level of the research team’s experience. The key factors to improve the animal model outcomes are an intra- and inter-team communication.