Recent progress in vertebral body section roentgenography in the study of the pathology of the lumbar vertebrae.

The potentialities of vertebral body section roentgenography have recently been enlarged to include the direct study of soft tissues within the vertebral canal. The writers report a series of observations on the pathology of disc protrusion, spinal stenosis and cicatricial stenosis following laminectomy, carried out by means of a third generation scanner, the Somatom SF. This apparatus makes it possible to integrate the data furnished by traditional radiological investigations and by scanners of previous generations, thus demonstrating new aspects of the pathology of the lumbar nerve roots.