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Review
. 2021 Sep 17;11(9):1705.
doi: 10.3390/diagnostics11091705.

Neuropathic Pain and Ultrasonography: A Multiperspective Literature Evaluation

Daniele Coraci  1 , Serena Vincenza Capobianco  2 , Marcello Romano  3 , Salvatore Calvaruso  4 , Michele Vecchio  5 , Silvia Giovannini  6 , Claudia Loreti  6 , Augusto Fusco  6 , Stefano Masiero  1 , Valter Santilli  7 , Luca Padua  6   8
Affiliations
Review

Neuropathic Pain and Ultrasonography: A Multiperspective Literature Evaluation

Daniele Coraci et al. Diagnostics (Basel). .

Abstract

Among the tools useful for the management of neuropathic pain, ultrasound presents several advantages, shown by the literature. We assessed the scientific production about neuropathic pain and ultrasound from different points of view: general topics, journal categories, geographical origin and lexical analysis. We searched papers on PubMed using the Medical Subject Headings "neuropathic pain" AND "ultrasound". We collected data about the journals where the papers were published, the country of the affiliation of the first author. For the lexical analysis, we evaluated the presence of selected words in the papers, and we built a graph representing the connections among words and papers. The papers were focused on the use of ultrasound as a diagnostic tool and guide for the therapy, assessing its application in different diseases such as Morton's neuroma and piriformis syndrome. The most represented journal category was anesthesia while the most common country the United States of America. The lexical analysis confirmed the importance of ultrasound for diagnosis of specific disease and treatment of pain. The described approaches provide a multiperspective evaluation of the literature and may support the interpretation of the information contained by the papers.

Keywords: diagnosis; graph-theory; pain; rehabilitation; treatment; ultrasound.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Presence of the term “neuropathic pain” in the books archived in Google. An increase is visible from the 1980s. In the x-axis the years are presented, in the y-axis the relative frequency of the terms in the digital sources.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Flowchart of the literature analysis.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Journal categories of the papers. The results are expressed as percentage with respect to the total amount of papers.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Geographical origin of the papers. The colors represent the percentage of the frequency of each country. The grey territories do not have any paper. The map was created by Datawrapper.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Results of the LENGTH approach. (A) The graph on the left represents the connections among words (blue) and papers (black), where the dimensions indicate the degrees. (B) The graph on the right considers the modularity classes indicated by different colors. The two bar charts show the degree (C) and the centrality values (D) of the words. The asterisk indicates the portion following the word root.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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