CT can effectively help doctors target cortisone injections in patients with chronic back pain, according to research presented at the annual German Radiology Congress (DRK) in Hamburg.
For the study, Euskirchener neuroradiologist Dr. Ulrich von Smekal and colleagues included 320 patients with chronic back pain who, with CT guidance, were injected with 40 mg of the long-acting cortisone preparation triamcinolone, combined with the local anesthetic bupivacaine. Patient pain was evaluated before the intervention and three months later. The researchers recorded patients' intensity of discomfort and their ability to work.
After three months, 89.9% of patients' radicular pain symptoms (from the nerve roots) were improved. For pseudoradicular (from vertebral joints) pain, the success rate was 84%, von Smekal's group found. Also three months after treatment, two-thirds of the study participants were back to work.
CT-guided pain therapy must be conducted along with physiotherapy and behavioral changes, von Smekal's team noted.
![Overview of the study design. (A) The fully automated deep learning framework was developed to estimate body composition (BC) (defined as subcutaneous adipose tissue [SAT] in liters; visceral adipose tissue [VAT] in liters; skeletal muscle [SM] in liters; SM fat fraction [SMFF] as a percentage; and intramuscular adipose tissue [IMAT] in deciliters) from MRI. The fully automated framework comprised one model (model 1) to quantify different BC measures (SAT, VAT, SM, SMFF, and IMAT) as three-dimensional (3D) measures from whole-body MRI scans. The second model (model 2) was trained to identify standardized anatomic landmarks along the craniocaudal body axis (z coordinate field), which allowed for subdividing the whole-body measures into different subregions typically examined on clinical routine MRI scans (chest, abdomen, and pelvis). (B) BC was quantified from whole-body MRI in over 66,000 individuals from two large population-based cohort studies, the UK Biobank (UKB) (36,317 individuals) and the German National Cohort (NAKO) (30,291 individuals). Bar graphs show age distribution by sex and cohort. BMI = body mass index. (C) After the performance assessment of the fully automated framework, the change in BC measures, distributions, and profiles across age decades were investigated. Age-, sex-, and height-adjusted body composition reference curves were calculated and made publicly available in a web-based z-score calculator (https://circ-ml.github.io).](https://img.auntminnieeurope.com/mindful/smg/workspaces/default/uploads/2026/05/body-comp.XgAjTfPj1W.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&dpr=2&fit=crop&h=167&q=70&w=250)
