Minimally Invasive Placement of Spinal Cord Stimulator Paddle Electrodes Is Associated With Improved Perioperative and Long-Term Experience Among Neuropathic Pain Patients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
STUDY DESIGN: Prospective, observational cohort study. OBJECTIVE: This study compared in-hospital and long-term outcomes among spinal cord stimulation (SCS) patients undergoing paddle insertion by open or minimally invasive surgery (MIS) approaches. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA: Patients with treatment-refractory extremity neuropathic pain may benefit from SCS. Conventional placement of surgical paddles for an external neurostimulation trial is through open laminectomy, but MIS techniques may offer advantages. METHODS: Twenty SCS patients were prospectively assessed. Open patients underwent caudal thoracic laminectomy for multicolumnar electrode paddle placement. MIS patients underwent paddle placement through interlaminar flavectomy using tubular retractors. Demographic data included age, sex, underlying diagnosis, and preoperative visual analog scale (VAS) extremity scores. Intraoperative data included operative duration, blood loss, and number of device passages to achieve final position. Perioperative data included VAS back pain scores; trial data included time-to-trial and time-to-decision. Postoperative data included 1 month VAS back pain scores and 1 year follow-up device complications. RESULTS: No demographic differences were observed among surgical cohorts. MIS procedures had shorter operative duration (P = 0.03), less blood loss (P < 0.001), and similar median number of device passages (2 vs 1.5, P = 0.71). MIS patients reported less perioperative surgical back pain (P < 0.05). External neurostimulation trials began sooner among MIS patients who also made sooner decision whether to implant the SCS device (2.8 ± 1.4 vs 4.3 ± 1.0 days, P = 0.013). Similar 1 month back pain scores were reported between surgical cohorts (P = 0.08). CONCLUSION: MIS techniques for SCS surgical paddle implantation is associated with less perioperative morbidity and surgical site back pain, shorter external neurostimulator trial duration, and long-term device stability benefits. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: 2.
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 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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".