Intradural synovial cyst of the upper cervical spine: A rare cause of symptomatic cord compression
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Synovial cysts are commonly observed soft-tissue masses of the spine, typically extradural and located in the lumbar region. We describe a very rare symptomatic case of a C1-C2 intradural synovial cyst. CASE DESCRIPTION: A 78-year-old female presented with progressive left side weakness, paresthesia, and hyperreflexia. The magnetic resonance imaging revealed a well-circumscribed, subtly enhancing lesion medial to the C1-2 facet, causing cord compression and edema. Using neurophysiological monitoring, surgery included a modified laminectomy of C2 with the removal of the C1 posterior arch. When the dura was opened, a sizable intradural extramedullary lesion was encountered, the cyst was successfully drained and partially resected. The histopathological diagnosis was consistent with a synovial cyst. Postoperatively, the patient's strength on the left side improved gradually until she was fully ambulatory. Postoperative imaging showed no recurrence at 8 months follow-up. CONCLUSION: Synovial cysts should be considered among the differential diagnose of C1-2 cysts. They can occur intradurally and compress the spinal cord resulting in a significant neurological deficit. Cyst excision may be accomplished utilizing a limited laminectomy for cyst identification and drainage, accompanied by partial resection of the cyst wall. Such intervention can lead to good clinical outcomes.
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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) | 0.000 | 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) | 0.002 | 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".