An observational study in Lower Back Pain, Facet Joint Pain; Low Back Pain and Osteoarthritis (OA), sponsored by Queen's University. Not yet recruiting. Open to participants aged 18 Years and older, including healthy volunteers. Per ClinicalTrials.gov, last updated 2025-07-29.
Sponsored by Queen's University · Observational
A common treatment for low back pain involves fluoroscopy-guided spinal facet joint injections and/or medial branch nerve blocks. Unfortunately, fluoroscopy requires expensive equipment and personnel and exposes patients and healthcare providers to ionizing radiation. Ultrasound offers a safer, lower-cost alternative, but the traditional 2-dimensional (2D) ultrasound systems are limited due to poor image quality, particularly in patients with higher body mass index (BMI).
As an alternative, a novel Bone Enhanced Ultrasound (BEUS) technology uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create real-time 3-dimensional (3D) images of the spine to guide needle placement for these injections. The AI software is trained by overlaying computed tomography (CT) and ultrasound images from a patient dataset to recognize anatomical landmarks. BEUS aims to ultimately replace fluoroscopy for spinal injections, reducing radiation exposure, lowering healthcare costs, and improving accessibility, especially in rural settings where CT and fluoroscopy are unavailable.
A key limitation, however, is that the current AI system is trained based primarily on patients (mostly pediatric) undergoing perioperative assessment of scoliosis. To address this, the current study aims to develop a new, more clinically relevant training AI dataset by collecting spinal ultrasounds from up to 100 adult participants (most/all of whom are followed at the local chronic pain clinic for low back pain) with existing spinal CT or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. This dataset will be used to retrain the current AI model to enhance the accuracy of 3D spinal reconstructions, thereby improving the clinical relevance of the BEUS system.
2,818 studies on the registry are indexed under Low Back Pain; 482 are open to participants now.
This study's planned enrollment of 100 is close to the median of 100 across 475 observational studies indexed under Low Back Pain.
Browse Low Back Pain studies →Queen's University is the lead sponsor of 199 studies on the registry; 16 are open to participants now.
Counted across the registry records on this site, refreshed daily.
Adults who have had previous CT or MRI scans of their spine in the past 5 years
Exclusion Criteria:
Individuals who have had a CT or MRI scans of their spine in the past 5 years
Diagnostic Test: spinal ultrasound
Coronal, axial, sagittal scans of the spine using ultrasound
Accuracy of 3D ultrasound spine reconstruction in adults with chronic low back pain
Time frame: From enrollment to end of US scan (30 days)
No study locations are listed for this record.
This study is not yet recruiting, as verified in Jun 2025. You cannot join it, but the record below documents what was studied.
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