That is, the kind used for seeing unborn babies.
I’ve had spinal xrays done and they tell me that protruding (“slipped”) discs are not visible, but they sort of know where they are from the displacements of other things they cause.
But wouldn’t sonography show them directly?
Sonography is safer than xrays, and much faster, since you can change the angle to inspect things you think you spot.
(I tried asking the company on their “live chat for sonographers” that makes these machines and their first question was “Are you a patient? If so, we cannot talk to you, ask your sonographer.”)
Get an MRI. It’s the best imaging modality for the soft tissues of the spine, including disc disease. Sonography is not good for structures that are encased in bone. The reason you can examine a fetal or neonatal spine with ultrasound is that the bones are still soft (and even with neonates it’s already not easy).
Yep, my son gets regular x-rays of his spine to check out the big picture (is all the hardware still in place? Is his scoliosis returning despite it?) but before surgery, he needed to get an MRI to check for subtle stuff before they cut him open.
An ultrasound was done of his kidneys and bladder, because spine defects are often linked with urogenital defects, but no ultrasound has been used on his spine.
(MRI? I thought I was asking what sonography can do, not what other methods can do.)
Well, I guess if they checked the kidney with sonography and then switched when viewing the spine, that may imply sonography won’t work.
I’m kind of surprised, because I’ve tried the machine on my hands and elbows, and can see all sorts of things like veins, tendons and bursae that are a lot like discs.
The interesting thing about sonography is that it has a selectable depth of field.
Thus you can see past sort tissues, muscles, by keeping them outside the field of focus.
Right, but not through bone. Bone casts a dense ultrasound shadow in which it’s not possible to see anything. The way the vertebrae are shaped and fit together in the spine makes it so that most of the regions where you would be likely to find pathology are hidden behind bone.
Yes, you correctly inferred what I was implying. The hospital we were working with was Shriner’s, so the tests were free for us - they had their own ultrasound (sonograph) machine, and if that would have worked well for the spine, they would have done it. Instead, they paid another hospital a couple grand to have the MRI done, because they didn’t have their own MRI machine.
BTW… I am a radiologist, specializing in imaging brains and spines at a really topnotch hospital, and I expect that I would probably have heard of spinal imaging by ultrasound (other than in the littlest ones) if it were an option.