ArticleBMC musculoskeletal disorders2023
PILLAR: ParaspInaL muscLe segmentAtion pRoject - a comprehensive online resource to guide manual segmentation of paraspinal muscles from magnetic resonance imaging.
Article in BMC musculoskeletal disorders, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Fat matters: paraspinal muscle quality is associated with electromyographic fatigability and endurance in lumbar spinal stenosis.North American Spine Society journal · 2026Article
- Article
- Radiomics: Current Applications and Future Directions.MedComm · 2026Review
- Automated deep-learning quantification of intramuscular fat in lumbar spine muscles on Dixon MRI: validation and normative reference values from 173 healthy adults.BMC medical imaging · 2026Article
- Epimuscular fat and its clinical relevance: a narrative review focused on paraspinal muscles.Quantitative imaging in medicine and surgery · 2026Review
- Development and reliability of a systematic method to evaluate lumbar paraspinal muscle size and quality in computed tomography images.North American Spine Society journal · 2025Article
- Evaluation of Paraspinal Muscle Epimuscular Fat in Subjects With Low Back Pain in a Tertiary Care Setting.Cureus · 2025Article
- Fat beyond muscle: Assessing epimuscular fat of the lumbar spine and its association with vertebral level, demographics, BMI, and low back pain.Brain & spine · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundThere is an increasing interest in assessing paraspinal morphology and composition in relation to low back pain (LBP). However, variations in methods and segmentation protocols contribute to the inconsistent findings in the literature. We present an on-line resource, the ParaspInaL muscLe segmentAtion pRoject (PILLAR, https://projectpillar.github.io/ ), to provide a detailed description and visual guide of a segmentation protocol by using the publicly available ITK-SNAP software and discuss related challenges when performing paraspinal lumbar muscles segmentations from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
methodsT2-weighted and corresponding fat-water IDEAL axial MRI from 3 males and 3 females (2 chronic LBP and 1 control for each sex) were used to demonstrate our segmentation protocol for each lumbar paraspinal muscle (erector spinae, lumbar multifidus, quadratus lumborum and psoas) and lumbar spinal level (L1-L5).
resultsProper segmentation requires an understanding of the anatomy of paraspinal lumbar muscles and the variations in paraspinal muscle morphology and composition due to age, sex, and the presence of LBP or related spinal pathologies. Other challenges in segmentation includes the presence and variations of intramuscular and epimuscular fat, and side-to-side asymmetry.
conclusionThe growing interest to assess the lumbar musculature and its role in the development and recurrence of LBP prompted the need for comprehensive and easy-to-follow resources, such as the PILLAR project to reduce inconsistencies in segmentation protocols. Standardizing manual muscle measurements from MRI will facilitate comparisons between studies while the field is progressively moving towards the automatization of paraspinal muscle measurements for large cohort studies.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.