Various surgical procedures of cervical laminoplasty, mainly developed and devised in Japan

Abstract

Cervical laminoplasty as a posterior decompression procedure instead of laminectomy had been firstly reported in Japan in 1970’s and 1980’s around the world. And its procedure has been developed and devised for a long time in Japan. Cervical laminoplasty has been mainly applied for narrow spinal canal due to cervical degenerative disorders including well‒known cervical spondylotic myelopathy (CSM) and ossified posterior longitudinal ligament (OPLL) and so on. Various procedures of cervical laminoplasty recently have been consolidated into main two procedures, open‒door laminoplasty and double open‒door laminoplasty. In this paper, I would like to focus on its developed history and consolidated stream using our original illustrations for each cervical laminoplasty.