Imaging of lumbar intervertebral disk degeneration and aging, excluding disk herniations.

ABSTRACT

With the advent of CT and MR imaging, physicians have been able to complement their clinical diagnosis of the cause of low back pain with a detailed in vivo image of the structure and soft tissues of the spine. At the same time, there has been an increasing realization that information about morphology alone is not enough to make a definitive diagnosis. Proponents of diskography claim that, through pain provocation, it can provide the specificity missing from the purely morphologic information that CT and MR imaging provide. The specificity of diskography, however, is far from clear.