Targeting the lateral neck of superior articular process and sub-mammillary fossa for lumbar medial branch radiofrequency ablation: A case series
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Lumbar medial branch (MB) radiofrequency ablation (RFA) is a common image-guided procedure to treat facetogenic low back pain. Recent anatomical literature has proposed a two-lesion RFA approach targeting the posterior portion of the lateral neck of superior articular process (SAP) and the superior aspect of the sub-mammillary fossa. The objectives of this report were to: 1) describe the novel lumbar MB RFA technique, 2) discuss the relevant anatomy, and 3) report pain relief outcomes in four patients who gave informed consent to be treated with the novel two-landmark lumbar MB RFA technique. Methods: Four patients were treated with the novel two-landmark lumbar MB RFA technique targeting the posterior half of the lateral neck of SAP and superior aspect of the sub-mammillary fossa. The quality and duration of pain relief following the treatment are described in this report. Results: All 4 patients, who received the novel technique, self-reported quality of pain relief of ≥80 %. One patient, who self-reported 100 % pain relief, elected not to have repeat RFA treatment at their 15-month follow-up appointment. All 4 patients reported pain relief duration ≥12 months and stated the quality of pain relief following procedure was "excellent" or the "best result" they experienced. Conclusions: This case series reports early evidence of the effectiveness of the two-landmark lumbar MB RFA technique. The novel approach shows promise in a limited number of patient cases and warrants further investigation.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".