It is crucial to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the imaging modalities to choose those that provide more accurate spinal status information during the follow-up. Imaging of the postoperative spine remained a challenging task in the early identification of complications and abnormal healing process.

This review also includes a short description of the most used diagnostic techniques in postoperative spine imaging: plain radiography, ultrasound (US), computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance (MR), and nuclear medicine.

Complications in the instrumented spine were also sorted in early (hardware fractures) and late findings (adjacent segment disease, hardware loosening, and implant migration). Complications in the noninstrumented spine were grouped in early (hematomas, pseudomeningocele, and postoperative spine infection) and late findings (arachnoiditis, radiculitis, recurrent disc herniation, spinal stenosis, and textiloma). This article presents a pictorial narrative review of the most common findings observed in noninstrumented and instrumented postoperative spines. Imaging of the postoperative spine requires the identification of several critical points by the radiologist to be written in the medical report: condition of the underlying cortical and cancellous bone, intervertebral disc, and musculoskeletal tissues location and integrity of surgical implants evaluation of the success of decompression procedures delineation of fusion status and identification of complications.

Picktorial 3.0 review