Easy to treat when the diagnosis is made: Three cases of clunealgia and the advantage of ultrasonography.

In this article, we present three cases of clunealgia admitted with low back pain. Their pain relieved with superior cluneal nerve block. The posterior side of the iliac crest, which is the location where the superior cluneal nerve passes, was identified using a high-frequency linear transducer. The drug injected separates the erector spinae muscle and thoracolumbar fascia and accumulates between these two structures. All patients were discharged with a complete pain relief. This report highlights the fact that superior cluneal nerve entrapment should be kept in mind in patients with low back pain and that ultrasound guidance can correctly identify the infiltration and eliminate anesthetization of other surrounding structures.

Performance evaluation of the machine learning algorithms used in inference mechanism of a medical decision support system.

The importance of the decision support systems is increasingly supporting the decision making process in cases of uncertainty and the lack of information and they are widely used in various fields like engineering, finance, medicine, and so forth, Medical decision support systems help the healthcare personnel to select optimal method during the treatment of the patients. Decision support systems are intelligent software systems that support decision makers on their decisions. The design of decision support systems consists of four main subjects called inference mechanism, knowledge-base, explanation module, and active memory. Inference mechanism constitutes the basis of decision support systems. There are various methods that can be used in these mechanisms approaches. Some of these methods are decision trees, artificial neural networks, statistical methods, rule-based methods, and so forth. In decision support systems, those methods can be used separately or a hybrid system, and also combination of those methods. In this study, synthetic data with 10, 100, 1000, and 2000 records have been produced to reflect the probabilities on the ALARM network. The accuracy of 11 machine learning methods for the inference mechanism of medical decision support system is compared on various data sets.