The model implies that pain may arise from the posterior elements, and predicts that anesthetizing the posterior elements should relieve the pain of compression fractures. Six cases are described in which controlled medial branch blocks relieved the pain of compression fractures of thoracic or lumbar vertebral bodies.
Conclusions. In some patients with vertebral compression fractures, the pain may arise from posterior
elements and not the fracture itself. This phenomenon has implications for the interpretation of the outcomes of vertebroplasty in both the active and control arms of sham-controlled studies.”
“It is known that a reduction of the field-of-view in 3-D X-ray imaging is proportional to a reduction in radiation dose. The resulting truncation, however, is incompatible with conventional reconstruction algorithms. Recently, a novel method for region IPI-549 manufacturer of interest reconstruction that uses neither prior knowledge nor extrapolation has been published, named approximated truncation robust algorithm
for computed tomography (ATRACT). It is based on a decomposition of the standard ramp filter into a 2-D Laplace filtering and a 2-D Radon-based residual filtering step. In this paper, we present two variants of the original ATRACT. One is based on expressing the residual filter as an efficient 2-D convolution with an analytically derived kernel. The second variant is to apply ATRACT in 1-D to further selleck chemicals reduce computational
complexity. Nec-1s ic50 The proposed algorithms were evaluated by using a reconstruction benchmark, as well as two clinical data sets. The results are encouraging since the proposed algorithms achieve a speed-up factor of up to 245 compared to the 2-D Radon-based ATRACT. Reconstructions of high accuracy are obtained, e. g., even real-data reconstruction in the presence of severe truncation achieve a relative root mean square error of as little as 0.92% with respect to nontruncated data.”
“Objective. To determine if thoracic facet joints may be a significant secondary pain generator in patients with compression fractures. Traditionally, pain from vertebral compression fractures has been attributed to vertebral body itself. Compression fractures have been shown to increase thoracic kyphosis and thereby increase the thoracic flexion moment; these changes eventually increase the shear stress on the posterior elements.
Design. We present a small case series of patients with thoracic compression fractures managed with intra-articular facet injections.
Setting. Tertiary care academic medical center.
Participants. Two patients with thoracic compression fractures.
Interventions. The subjects received fluoroscopically guided thoracic facet steroid injections for pain management.
Main Outcome. Change in verbal analog pain score.
Results.