Imaging of the Postoperative Spine: Cages, Prostheses, and Instrumentation

Abstract

Spinal instrumentation has undergone tremendous evolution in the more than 125 years since the fi rst reported internal fi xation of the spine in 1888 by B. F. Wilkins, who reduced a dislocated T12–L1 vertebrae by fi xing a wire with carbonized silver suture passed around the pedicles of the T12 and L1 vertebrae (Cotler 1999). In 1911 Albee and Hibbs, at two dif- ferent institutions in New York, performed the fi rst biological fusion procedures of the spine by using autogenous bone graft (Albee 1911; Hibbs 1911). Between these historical events, one of the most sig- nifi cant technological advances to impact the devel- opment of spinal instrumentation (and medicine in general) took place: William Roentgen’s discovery of X-ray imaging in 1895. Since these early events, the two landmark developments in spinal instrumenta- tion of the past century were the interspinous wiring technique described by Rogers in the early 1940s and the rod/hook instrumentation system of Harrington for treatment of postpoliomyelitis scoliosis in the 1950s (Benzel 1994).