Ventrolateral Partial Dorsal Root Entry Zone Rhizotomy for Occipital Neuralgia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE AND IMPORTANCE: Medically refractory occipital neuralgia (ON) has been treated with a variety of neuroablative procedures. The present case report supports the effectiveness of ventrolateral partial rhizotomy (pVL-DREZ) of the C1 to C3 cervical dorsal roots, a relatively unknown procedure. CLINICAL PRESENTATION: A 46-year-old woman had a 14-month history of severe right-sided ON. Multiple trials of medical treatments, nerve blocks and local steroid injections had failed. Her daily opioid requirements had escalated to include frequent injections in addition to prescribed oral opiates. INTERVENTION AND RESULTS: A pVL-DREZ at the right C1 to C3 level was performed through a C1 laminectomy and C2 right laminotomy. The ipsilateral upper cervical dorsal roots were exposed and a 1 mm deep incision was made at a 45 degrees angle to the sagittal midline at the ventrolateral aspect of each dorsal rootlet entry. The patient experienced postoperative opioid withdrawal seizure and transient disequilibrium for two weeks. Touch sensation was preserved and complete abolition of ON over a four year follow-up was achieved. CONCLUSION: The pVL-DREZ procedure provided complete pain relief for the patient and avoided the potential complications often encountered with other destructive interventions. pVL-DREZ should be considered among the available options for the treatment of refractory ON.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".