Brain structural correlates of postoperative axial pain in degenerative cervical myelopathy patients following posterior cervical decompression surgery: a voxel-based morphometry study

BMC Medical Imaging

Research

Xinlong Ma¹  Aixian Tian¹  Zhan Wang¹  Na Li¹  Jianxiong Ma¹  Lin Guo²  Hongzhi Gao² 

[1] Orthopedic Research Institute, Tianjin Hospital, Tianjin University, Jiefang Nan Road 406, Hexi District, 300211, Tianjin, P. R. China;Radiology Department, Tianjin Hospital, Tianjin University, Jiefang Nan Road 406, Hexi District, 300211, Tianjin, P. R. China;

关键词: Degenerative cervical myelopathy;    Central sensitization;    Postoperative axial pain;    Support vector machine;    Voxel-based morphometry;    fMRI;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12880-023-01057-8

 received in 2023-02-19, accepted in 2023-07-18,  发布年份 2023

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

ObjectiveTo investigate the brain structural correlates of postoperative axial pain (PAP) in degenerative cervical myelopathy (DCM) following posterior cervical decompression surgery.MethodsStructural images with high-resolution T1 weighting were collected from 62 patients with DCM and analyzed, in addition to 42 age/gender matched subjects who were healthy. Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) was analyzed, grey matter volume (GMV) was computed. One-way ANOVA was performed to reveal the GMV differences among DCM patients with PAP, patients without PAP and healthy controls (HC). Post-hoc analyses were conducted to identify the pair-wise GMV differences among these three groups. Analyses of correlations were conducted to uncover the link between clinical measurements and GMV variations. Last, support vector machine (SVM) was conducted to test the utility of GMV for classifying PAP and nPAP DCM patients.ResultsThree main findings were observed: [1] Compared to healthy controls, DCM patients showed a significantly lower GMV in the precuneus preoperatively. DCM patients with PAP also exhibited a lower GMV within precuneus than those without; [2] In DCM patients with PAP, the precuneus GMV was inversely related to the postoperative pain intensity; [3] Moreover, successful classification between PAP and nPAP were observed via SVM based on precuneus GMV as features.ConclusionIn summary, our results indicate that precuneus GMV may be linked to PAP in DCM, and could be employed to forecast the emergence of PAP in DCM patients.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© BioMed Central Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2023

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