Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Recent research has shed further light on the place of ultrasound imaging in neuraxial blockade in routine clinical practice, its use in thoracic epidurals, and real-time ultrasound-guided techniques. RECENT FINDINGS: Compared with the conventional technique of surface landmark palpation, preprocedural ultrasound imaging minimizes technical difficulty associated with lumbar neuraxial blockade in patients with poor-quality surface landmarks. Novice practitioners are able to learn to employ the technique effectively. Safety benefits include a reduction in postprocedural back pain associated with fewer needle passes and a lower risk of procedure-associated bleeding. The advantage of ultrasound is minimal however in patients with easily discernible surface landmarks, especially if the practitioner is highly experienced. Recent trials show that preprocedural ultrasound scanning for thoracic epidural insertion reduces needle punctures and increases early analgesic efficacy compared with the palpation technique. Real-time ultrasound-guided techniques, while feasible, remain challenging and may not offer significant benefit over preprocedural imaging in lumbar neuraxial blockade. Their role in thoracic epidural insertion requires further investigation. SUMMARY: Ultrasound imaging of the spine is a valuable technique that, while not indicated for routine use, should be part of the skillset of any practitioner that regularly performs lumbar and thoracic neuraxial blockade.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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".