The case of a 67-year-old patient with an acupuncture needle remaining in his left lung is described. This foreign body was a remnant of a procedure performed by a doctor 17 years previously for osteoarthritic back pain. On the basis of this case, a review was performed of literature available in the PubMed database dealing with acupuncture needles remaining in a patient's body. A total of 25 a...

INTRODUCTION Although uncommon, selective cervical nerve root blocks can have serious complications. The most serious complications that have been reported include cerebral infarction, spinal cord infarction, transient quadriplegia and death. CASE PRESENTATION A 40-year-old Japanese woman with a history of severe right-sided cervical radicular pain was scheduled to undergo a right-sided C6 se...

The vascular and nervous structures and their relations with the spinal nerve roots were examined in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th posterior sacral foramina in relation to percutaneous needle insertion for neuromodulation. A foraminal branch provided by the lateral sacral artery to each foramen entered the inferior lateral quadrant of each foramen, adjacent to the nerve root medially. Facing the posteri...

Spinal anaesthesia is the most preffered anesthesia technique for total hip replacement, and its complications range from low entity (insignificant) to life threatening. The incidence of neurologic complications after neuraxial anaesthesia is not perfectly clear, although there are several described cases of spinal cord ischaemia. We present a case of unilateral T8-T11 spinal cord ischaemia fol...

OBJECTIVES To experimentally compare the standard 22G spinal needle with a newer 23G needle with specific ultrasound visualisation tip (Cook echotip®, Spencer, Indiana, USA) in the setting of ultrasound-guided invasive intrauterine procedures. MATERIALS AND METHODS We first determined the size of the defects created in human fetal membranes using light microscopy and adapted area calculating ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Injection therapies play a major role in the treatment of lower back pain and are to date performed mainly under CT or fluoroscopic guidance. The benefits of US-guided instillation procedures have been shown in many studies. We conducted this study to simplify an US-guided approach to the lumbar spinal nerves and to assess the feasibility and preliminary accuracy by means...

OBJECTIVE Our goal was to demonstrate which position would be hemodynamically and technically better by comparing the effects of combined spinal epidural (CSE) in the sitting or lateral decubitus position for elective cesarean deliveries on maternal and neonatal parameters and ephedrine requirement. METHODS Sixty parturients were randomly assigned into two groups to perform CSE in the sitting...

Specially selected soft Macintosh balloon indicators were attached to needles during five extradural and five spinal punctures. When the needle point entered the extradural space, the mean balloon pressure decreased suddenly from 24.9 (range 14-37) to 12.3 (10-16) mm Hg in the five extradural punctures and from 22.3 (17-28) to 13.7 (10-17) mm Hg in the five spinal punctures. In the five spinal ...

Ultrasound-guided needle insertion is essential in many of minimally invasive surgeries or procedures, such as biopsy, drug delivery, spinal anaesthesia, etc. Accurate and safe needle insertion is a difficult task due to the high requirement of hand-eye coordination skills. Many proposed virtual reality (VR) based training systems put their emphasis on realistic simulation instead of pedagogica...