Free Spine CT Viewer for Vertebral Fractures and Bony Stenosis

Getting From Disc To Report

Why A Spine CT Gets Ordered Instead Of An MRI

Surgeons and emergency physicians reach for spine CT when the question is about bone architecture rather than nerve or disc tissue. After a fall or crash, CT is what separates a stable wedge compression fracture from an unstable burst fracture, because the thin axial slices show retropulsed bone fragments in the canal far more precisely than an MRI or plain film. The same logic applies to a pars interarticularis defect, where CT confirms whether the lucent line is a chronic pars fracture, and to grading spondylolisthesis, where the degree of one vertebra slipping forward on the next is measured directly off the sagittal reformat.

CT is also the default check after spinal fusion. It measures pedicle screw position relative to the vertebral cortex, flags a screw that has breached the pedicle wall or backed out, and screens for non-union at the fusion mass when hardware failure is suspected. When degenerative change is the concern, CT shows facet arthropathy and bony foraminal narrowing with a clarity that MRI cannot match on cortical bone, which is why a CT is often added when an MRI is inconclusive about whether canal or foraminal narrowing is coming from bone spurs or soft tissue.

What A Spine CT Dataset Actually Contains

A modern spine CT is acquired as a helical volume of sub-millimeter axial slices through the scanned levels, then reconstructed on a sharp bone kernel that makes cortical margins, pars defects, and fracture lines crisp. Because the acquired voxels are isotropic, the scanner or the viewer can reformat that single axial pass into sagittal and coronal planes without losing detail, which is exactly how a spondylolisthesis grade or a compression fracture’s height loss is read, along the long axis of the spine rather than slice by slice on axial alone.

What The Viewer Puts In Your Hands

Making Sense Of The Report Wording

Spine CT reports lean on a handful of recurring phrases. “Compression fracture” describes a vertebral body that has lost height anteriorly, reported as a percentage; a “burst fracture” adds a retropulsed posterior fragment pushing into the canal, which is the detail that changes whether a fracture is stable. “Pars defect” refers to a lucent line through the pars interarticularis, and when paired with forward slip of one vertebra on the next, the report will grade the spondylolisthesis on a scale that tracks how far the vertebra has moved. “Facet arthropathy” means degenerative thickening of the small joints at the back of the spine, and “foraminal narrowing” or “central canal stenosis” describes how much that thickening, along with disc bulge, has crowded the space around the nerves. Post-fusion studies add “hardware position” language, noting whether pedicle screws sit within the pedicle cortex and whether the fusion mass shows bridging bone.

Where CT Stops And MRI Takes Over

For cortical and cancellous bone, nothing beats CT: fracture lines, pars defects, facet joints, and hardware position all read cleanly off a spine slice. Ask it about the spinal cord, nerve roots, or disc material instead, and it falls flat — those tissues blur into a similar soft-tissue gray that only separates on MRI's contrast-weighted sequences. A disc herniation pressing on a nerve root, cord compression, or an early infection can look entirely unremarkable on a CT slice even while causing real symptoms. That is why a burst fracture gets its bone mapped on CT first, with an MRI layered on when cord or nerve root compromise still needs an answer.

Supported Spine CT Formats

Frequently Asked Questions

Reformats For Fracture And Fusion Planning

A multi-level spine scan is almost always a genuine volumetric acquisition, which is exactly what lets it fold cleanly into sagittal and coronal planes. Pointing out vertebral height loss, a retropulsed fragment, or a screw’s trajectory is far simpler on a long-axis sagittal view than by describing a stack of flat slices — though how sharp that reformat looks still comes down to the original slice thickness, spacing, and kernel the scanner used.

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