Clinical Effectiveness of Single Lumbar Periradicular Infiltration in Patients with Sciatica

Periradicular therapy (PRT) is a minimally invasive radiological procedurein patients with chronic lumbar pain.The aim of the study is to identify clinical and radiological predictive factors for treatment success after a single PRT treatment in patients with sciatica.The study includes a prospective follow-up of 166 patients treated with PRT. The pain intensity is determined according to the VAS scale and the degree of improvement is presented as excellent (over 75%), good (50-70%), moderate (25-49%), and weak (less than 25%). The follow up of the treated patients was done at 2 weeks, 3 and 6 months. In patients with pain duration up to 3 months, the improvement was excellent in n=32 (58.18%) after 2 weeks, after 3 months n=41 (74.55%) and after 6 months n=41 (74.55%). This stands in contrast to patients with pain over 1 year. The percentage of improvement after 6 months, post-intervention, was highest in patients without nerve root compression (86.25±19.2),and the highest improvement after 6 months was in patients with localization of pain at the L4-L5 level (69.69±29.7), the greatest improvement after six months was in patients with extraforaminal hernia (62.82±34.3), and the lowest in patients with central stenosis (40.21±30.7).Our study results suggest that the shorter a pain duration, low-grade root compression, injection level and type of herniation area predictor the more favourable response patients have to transforaminal epidural steroid injection in patients with sciatica.

Intensity-Curvature Measurement Approaches for the Diagnosis of Magnetic Resonance Imaging Brain Tumors

This research presents signal-image post-processing techniques called Intensity-Curvature Measurement Approaches with application to the diagnosis of human brain tumors detected through Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Post-processing of the MRI of the human brain encompasses the following model functions: (i) bivariate cubic polynomial, (ii) bivariate cubic Lagrange polynomial, (iii) monovariate sinc, and (iv) bivariate linear. The following Intensity-Curvature Measurement Approaches were used: (i) classic-curvature, (ii) signal resilient to interpolation, (iii) intensity-curvature measure and (iv) intensity-curvature functional. The results revealed that the classic-curvature, the signal resilient to interpolation and the intensity-curvature functional are able to add additional information useful to the diagnosis carried out with MRI. The contribution to the MRI diagnosis of our study are: (i) the enhanced gray level scale of the tumor mass and the well-behaved representation of the tumor provided through the signal resilient to interpolation, and (ii) the visually perceptible third dimension perpendicular to the image plane provided through the classic-curvature and the intensity-curvature functional.