Topographic Anatomy of the Posterior Ramus of Thoracic Spinal Nerve and Surrounding Structures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
STUDY DESIGN: Cadaver dissection. OBJECTIVE: To examine the potential points of spinal nerve entrapment and the articular branches in the thoracic spine. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA: Despite many cadaver studies focused on the cervical and lumbar spinal nerves, detailed anatomy of the thoracic nerve branches is missing from the viewpoint of painful neuropathy on the thoracic region. METHODS: A total of 120 pairs of thoracic spinal nerves out of 10 donated cadavers were dissected. Detailed anatomy of the posterior ramus and medial/lateral branches and their fine branches in the entire thoracic region was investigated by both macroscopic and stereomicroscopic dissections. RESULTS: The posterior ramus of the thoracic nerve passed through the narrow space between the bony structures and adjacent fibrous tissue. It is sent to the first branch, which is called "the descending branch," before bifurcating into medial and lateral branches. The medial branch runs posterolaterally, then turns medially along the edge of multifidus, and passes between that and semispinalis, whereas the lateral branch runs underneath the intertransverse ligament. Both medial and lateral cutaneous branches penetrated the thoracolumbar fascia, and the medial cutaneous branch penetrated the tendinous portion of back muscles. CONCLUSION: Several points might be listed as potential sites of entrapment along the course of the posterior ramus of the thoracic nerve and its branches, leading to the cause of thoracic back pain. In addition, the articular branch entering the facet (zygapophyseal) joint originated from the descending branch, which was the first branch of the posterior ramus.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".