The spinal cord ends at the top of the lumbar spine, and the remaining nerve roots, called the cauda equina, descend down the remainder of the spinal canal. This volume serves a broad audience as contributions were written by both clinicians and researchers, which reflects the intended readership as well, being a potentially comprehensive book for all spine related clinicians, technicians, scientists, and graduate students. The lower back comprises the lumbar spine, which is formed by vertebral bones, intervertebral discs, nerves, muscles, ligaments, and blood vessels. While this discussion of stenosis centers on the lumbar spine, the principles may also be applied to the cervical and thoracic regions. Computational methods support and enhance the physician’s ability to utilize these imaging techniques for diagnosis, non-invasive treatment, and intervention in clinical practice.Ĭhapters cover a broad range of topics encompassing radiological imaging modalities, clinical imaging applications for common spine diseases, image processing, computer-aided diagnosis, quantitative analysis, data reconstruction and visualization, statistical modeling, image-guided spine intervention, and robotic surgery. The qualitative imaging findings in stenosis of the lumbar spine may be broadly classified into the specific causes of anatomic narrowing and their effect on neural elements.
Spine imaging via computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, and other radiologic imaging modalities, is essential for noninvasively visualizing and assessing spinal pathology. The image in (B) shows the sacral cornua from the water-based spine phantom the image in (C) shows a three-dimensional (3D) reconstructed image of the sacrum at the level of the sacral hiatus from a 3D CT dataset from the author’s archive and the image in (D) shows a transverse CT slice of the sacrum at the level of the sacral cornua. This book is instrumental to building a bridge between scientists and clinicians in the field of spine imaging by introducing state-of-the-art computational methods in the context of clinical applications. Degenerative cervical spine disease (cervical spondylosis) is osteoarthritis of the spine, which includes the spontaneous degeneration.