Assessing the treatment response of lateral elbow tendinopathy using time-dependent ultrasonography, Doppler imaging, and elastography
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To investigate the structural alterations, neovascularity, and elasticity of tendons and the relationship between elasticity and the Patient Rated Tennis Elbow Evaluation score after undergoing US-guided fenestration or surgery in patients with chronic lateral elbow tendinopathy. METHODS: Participants from the per-protocol population of a randomized trial conducted between October 2016 and June 2020 were included. The surgery and fenestration groups included 24 (mean age, 50 ± 7 years [standard deviation], 10 men) and 29 (47 ± 8 years, 18 men) participants, respectively. Ultrasound exams were performed at baseline, 6 months, and 12 months. Statistical analyses included linear mixed effects and generalized equation estimation models. RESULTS: Fenestration had no significant impact on tendon thickness (p = 0.46). Conversely, surgery significantly increased tendon thickness at 6 months (p < 0.0001) and remained elevated at 12 months (p = 0.04). Tendon echostructure exhibited a group effect (p = 0.03), indicating a higher proportion of pathological scores in the surgery group post-intervention compared to the fenestration group. Both groups showed a similar reduction in neovascularity from 6 to 12 months postintervention (p = 0.006). Shear-wave velocity increased in the fenestration group at 6 months (p = 0.04), while the surgery group experienced a nonsignificant decrease at 6 months, with some improvement at 12 months (p = 0.08). Changes in shear-wave velocity did not correlate with clinical outcome. CONCLUSIONS: Fenestration and surgery reduced tendon neovascularity over time. Unlike surgery, fenestration did not impact tendon size while improving tendon echostructure and elasticity. CRITICAL RELEVANCE STATEMENT: Fenestration and surgery equally alleviated symptoms and decreased tendon neovascularity in lateral elbow tendinopathy; however, fenestration did not alter tendon thickness and improved echostructure and shear-wave velocity, suggesting shear-wave velocity's potential for quantitatively monitoring tendon elasticity during healing. KEY POINTS: Reliable markers for monitoring healing response and informing treatment protocols in elbow tendinopathy are lacking. Fenestration and surgery reduced tendon neovascularity, while fenestration improved tendon echostructure and shear-wave velocity. Shear-wave velocity may provide quantitative measures to monitor tendon elasticity in response to treatment.
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 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".