Symptomatic lumbar degenerative disk disease, or discogenic back pain, is difficult to treat. Patients often report transverse low back pain that radiates into the sacroiliac joints. Radicular or claudicatory symptoms are generally absent unless there is concomitant nerve compression. Physical examination findings are often unremarkable. Radiographic examination may reveal disk space narrowing,...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The present standard for staging intervertebral disk degeneration is a discrete scale, consisting usually of 5 stages. The purpose of this pilot study was to investigate the use of T2 measurements as a continuous measure of intervertebral disk degeneration. METHODS We obtained images in 5 volunteers with a 3D fast spin-echo sequence modified for the purpose of calculati...

We describe a minimally invasive arthroscopic technique for anterior diskectomy of the cervical spine. Fingertip pressure is applied between the carotid sheath laterally and the pharynx medially. The trachea and esophagus are displaced to the contralateral side. The disk level, soft-tissue thickness, and midline are verified with image intensification. A spinal needle is inserted through the so...

A classically identified "notochordal" cell population in the nucleus pulposus is thought to regulate disk homeostasis. However, the embryonic origin of these cells has been under dispute for >60 years. Here we provide the first direct evidence that all cell types in the adult mouse nucleus pulposus are derived from the embryonic notochord. Additionally, rare isolated embryonic notochord cells ...

Two adolescents with debilitating, medication-resistant, chronic pain of the low back and abdomen with intermittent pain of the genitalia were diagnosed with intervertebral disk disease at spinal cord levels that correlated with their signs. Both patients had undergone multiple evaluations by physicians of different specialties and both underwent appendectomy without relief of their pain. The h...

PURPOSE To establish the normal range of the position of the conus medullaris in neonates and determine whether it differs from that in adults. METHODS One hundred five healthy neonates born over an 18-day period in a single obstetric unit had ultrasound examinations of their lower spines to relate the conus medullaris to the nearest intervertebral disk or midvertebral level. RESULTS The me...

OBJECTIVES To describe a cohort of significantly injured roller coaster riders and the likely levels of acceleration at which the injuries occurred, and to compare these data with contemporary efforts to define a lower limit of acceleration below which no significant spinal injury is likely to occur. DESIGN A retrospective case series of roller coaster ride-induced significant spinal injuries...

This article describes a case of a 13-year-old girl with single-level calcified cervical disk herniation. The patient was treated conservatively for a symptomatic intervertebral calcification that caused neurological compression, and the data were reviewed retrospectively. Previous reports have shown that the natural history of the disease is self-limiting with a benign course and an excellent ...

In this paper, an innovative data pre-processing method to improve the classification performance and to determine automatically the vertebral column disorders including disk hernia (DH), spondylolisthesis (SL) and normal (NO) groups has been proposed. In the classification of vertebral column disorders' dataset with three classes, a pairwise fuzzy C-means (FCM) based feature weighting method h...

background and importance: disk sequestration can be defined as a herniated disk with perforation of the fibrous ring (or outermost annulus fibrosus) and posterior longitudinal ligament with migration of the disk fragment to the epidural space. even after the introduction of high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (mri), it is still frequently misinterpreted as neoplastic masses. unfortunate...