Abstract:[Objective] To analyze the significance of drainage culture before removal of drainage tube in spinal surgery. [Methods]From September 2019 to September 2024, 933 patients who underwent open spinal surgery in our hospital were included in this study. Be-fore the drainage tube was removed, the drainage fluid of the incision drainage tube was harvested for bacteria culture. The results of bacteri-al culture were recorded and compared according to clinical indicators. [Results] Of the 933 patients, 89 were positive with 97 pathogenicstrains isolated, including 49 gram-positive strains, 47 gram-negative strains and 1 fungal strain. As results of stratified comparison, the pos-itive rate according to the surgical site was ranked from high to low as, posterior cervical > thoracic > lumbar > anterior cervical, with a statis-tical significance (P<0.05). The positive rate of culture in patients with operation time ≥4 h was significantly higher than that in patients withoperation time <4 h (11.7% vs 6.8%, P=0.013), and the positive rate of culture in patients with increased inflammatory indexes was signifi-cantly higher than that in patients without increased inflammatory indexes (23.1% vs 7.3%, P<0.001). The positive rate of culture in patientswith incision exudate was significantly higher than that in those without incision exudate (15.2% vs 7.5%, P<0.001). However, there was nosignificant difference in culture positive rate between diabetic and non-diabetic patients (7.3% vs 10.2%, P=0.220). [Conclusion] The re-sults of incision drainage culture in spinal surgery have a certain predictive role on postoperative wound deep infection, but the samplingtechnique should be improved to reduce false positive results.