Background: Cervical spine trauma is a serious and complicated injury, affects both spine and spine cord. Evaluation of cervical spine trauma is crucial for selecting effective treatment methods.
Purposes: To describe characteristics on X-ray and CT scanner of the cervical spine in trauma and to evaluate the value of X-ray for the cervical spine trauma.
Materials and Method: A cross-sectional study of 33 patients with cervical spine injury seen on CT from 08/2014 to 08/2015 at Hue Central Hospital and Hue University Hospital.
Results: Average age was 43 years. The majority was males (the ratio was 4.5). The most common reason of injury were motor vehicle crashes and labor accidents. The most common site of injury was C5 - C6 level. There were 4/33 cases of upper cervical spine fractures and there were 29/33 cases of lower cervical spine fractures, in which blunt fracture, dislocation fracture, simple fracture were mainly identified on CT than on X-ray, p <0.05. The Kappa value for measuring the realiability between X-ray and CT in findings of body spine fractures was moderate (0.41 < K = 0.598 < 0.6). The ratio in finding posterior arch of lower cervical spine fractures on CT were higher than on X-ray, particularly in laminar frature and multiple sites fracture. There was no diagnostic suitability between X-ray and CT in detecting posterior arch of lower cervical spine fractures, K= 0.115 < 0.2.
Conclusion: X-ray is still valuable in clinical practice in medical facilities that have not been equipped with modern specialized equipment in odontoid fracture type 2, Hangman fracture and dislocated injuries besides using CT and MRI.
Key words: Cervical vertebrate; Trauma; Morphologic characteristics
The Development and Evaluation of the Subaxial Injury Classification Scoring System for Cervical Spine Trauma