Cervical Disc Herniations and Percutaneous Laser Disc Decompression: A Case Report
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: This is a report on 178 herniated cervical discs in 93 patients treated with percutaneous laser disc decompression (PLDD) using the Nd:YAG laser at the Laser Spine Center from November 1994 to October 2003. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Patients with MRI documented disc herniations in the cervical spine who had failed conservative treatment and were sufficiently symptomatic to require surgical intervention were included in the study. A Seldinger needle was inserted under fluoroscopic guidance and local anesthesia into the offending cervical disc from an anterolateral approach until the tip was just beyond the annulus. Through an optical fiber connected to an Nd:YAG laser, 300 joules were delivered to the disc. A dressing was applied and the patient sent home, to return to work the following day. RESULTS: According to the MacNab criteria, 90% of the patients improved. All of them were permitted to return to work the following day. One complication (0.6%) occurred: a retro-esophageal abscess that responded to incision and drainage. CONCLUSION: PLDD of cervical disc herniations is effective and relatively non-invasive, and has a low complication rate. Because of the complexity of vital adjacent anatomic structures, it should only be performed after intensive training by a qualified interventionist with appropriate experience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".