Effects of Age and Spinal Level on the Dimensions of the Lumbar Spinal Canal Measured in vivo

INTRODUCTION Accurate morphometric characterization of the lumbar spinal canal is important in understanding low back disorders such as lumbar spinal stenosis. Current conventional methods measuring the AP diameter of the canal, a common parameter for defining the canal, use practical and clinically available methods where patient CT scans are analyzed in 2D. This method, however, does not take into account the obliquity of the spine potentially omitting the fact that the AP diameter might not lie in an arbitrarily predefined anatomical plane (e.g. sagittal or coronal), leading to less accurate measurements. The purpose of this study was to utilize a novel 3D CT-based measurement approach to account for the obliquity of the spine and obtain a more accurate measurement of the lumbar spinal bony canal.