High-frequency transcranial magnetic stimulation may be used to manage chronic central pain and improve quality of life in patients with mild traumatic brain injury. However, this is a pilot study and further research is needed.

Application of PRF to the DRG appears to be an effective and relatively safe intervention technique for chronic cervical radicular pain refractory to repeated TFESIs.

High-frequency rTMS could be used as a safe, beneficial therapeutic tool to manage HSP. We think it can be used as an adjuvant therapeutic modality to enhance the therapeutic outcome of HSP.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) causes not only loss of sensory and motor function below the level of injury but also chronic pain, which is difficult and challenging of the treatment. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to the motor cortex, of non-invasive therapeutic methods, has the motor and sensory consequences and modulates pain in SCI-patients. In the present study, we studied the effectiveness of rTMS and the relationship between the modulation of pain and the changes of neuroglial expression in the spinal cord using a rat SCI-induced pain model. Elevated expressions of Iba1 and GFAP, specific microglial and astrocyte markers, was respectively observed in dorsal and ventral horns at the L4 and L5 levels in SCI rats. But in SCI rats treated with 25 Hz rTMS for 8 weeks, these expressions were significantly reduced by about 30%. Our finding suggests that this attenuation of activation by rTMS is related to pain modulation after SCI. Therefore, rTMS might provide an alternative means of attenuating neuropathic pain below the level of SCI.

Hand spasticity with a flexor pattern is a common problem affecting stroke patients and can result in pain, contractures, esthetic concerns, skin maceration, and overall loss of function. Poststroke (≥6 months) hemiparetic adult patients having a Modified Ashworth Scale (MAS) score of ≥1 for metacarpophalangeal flexion and thumb adduction spasticity were selected to receive an ultrasound-guided 20% ethyl alcohol block performed perineurally at the level of the deep branch of the ulnar nerve. Their MAS scores were evaluated pretreatment at 1 month and the change in MAS scores was assessed using Wilcoxon’s test. The threshold for statistical significance was set at p < 0.05. The mean MAS score for the flexor muscles of the 5 MCP joints and for thumb adduction was reduced from 3.3 ± 0.5 at pretreatment to 0.9 ± 0.5 at 1 month after the injection for the 10 patients. One month after the injection, the MAS scores were significantly reduced compared with those at pretreatment (p < 0.001), without complications. These are encouraging results showing that ultrasound-guided alcohol blocks of the deep branch of the ulnar nerve are safe and can help chronic stroke patients with metacarpophalangeal flexion and thumb adduction spasticity at 1 month.

A convolutional neural network (CNN) is a representative deep-learning algorithm that has a significant advantage in image recognition and classification. Using anteroposterior pelvic radiographs as input data, we developed a CNN algorithm to determine the presence of pre-collapse osteonecrosis of the femoral head (ONFH). We developed a CNN algorithm to differentiate between ONFH and normal radiographs. We retrospectively included 305 anteroposterior pelvic radiographs (right hip: pre-collapsed ONFH = 79, normal = 226; left hip: pre-collapsed ONFH = 62, normal = 243) as data samples. Pre-collapsed ONFH was diagnosed using pelvic magnetic resonance imaging data for each patient. Among the 305 cases, 69.8% of the included data samples were randomly selected as the training set, 21.0% were selected as the validation set, and the remaining 9.2% were selected as the test set to evaluate the performance of the developed CNN algorithm. The area under the curve of our developed CNN algorithm on the test data was 0.912 (95% confidence interval, 0.773–1.000) for the right hip and 0.902 (95% confidence interval, 0.747–1.000) for the left hip. We showed that a CNN algorithm trained using pelvic radiographs would help diagnose pre-collapse ONFH.

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