Low back pain is the second most common complaint (after the common cold) encountered by primary care physicians, the practitioners. Treating patients with low back pain can be particularly frustrating, at times, for the clinicians, and imaging is a common diagnostic tool used to gather information and direct therapy. Nowadays the practitioners prefer Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanning for all their patients with low backaches, as MRI is considered the best single imaging modality of the spine for its ability to demonstrate all of the spinal components—bone, discs, ligaments, fatty tissue, dura, CSF, neural tissue, and blood vessels—with superb contrast resolution. Back pain results from many causes, including degenerative and congenital spinal stenosis, neoplasm, infection, trauma, and inflam-matory or arthritic processes. Acquired spinal stenosis due to degenerative joint and disc disease, accounts for the vast 6majority of cases. The following structures may be responsible for the origin of back pain:

Most often, acquired narrowing of the spinal canal is due to a combination of bone, ligament, joint, and disc disease. The most common location of these changes is the lumbar spine.

Diagnostic tools such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provide important information that enhance the practitioner's ability to understand the origin of the patient's complaints and make the most appropriate therapeutic choices, be them conservative or surgical.

This book is designed to serve as an introductory guide for those busy practitioners who strive to enhance their clinical skills and ability to provide excellent care to patients suffering from pain due to lumbar spinal diseases. Various diseases affecting the low back are presented with basic imaging studies. Each image has a corresponding line diagram, followed by image interpretation and a brief comment about the disease. Color diagrams are also used to enhance the understanding of the images. It is hoped that after reading this book physicians will become familiar with the MR images and the correlating imaging studies with clinical findings.7

This MRI Spine in Low Backache Made Easy for the General Practitioners is an effort to help the clinician in the visualization of the lumbar spine by defining normal and abnormal spinal anatomy and pathology in a clear concise manner. This will be attempted by means of high quality images, abundant line diagrams (some of them in color), image interpretation and appropriate comments. A general overview in certain conditions (spine secondaries, disc herniations, etc.) is given in order to give an indepth understanding of the particular condition. This pocket book has 77 (seventy seven) MR images, 91 (ninety one) line diagrams, 15 color images (fifteen) and 6 (six) tables. Almost each MR image has a corresponding line diagram for better interpretation and understanding.

This is neither a textbook of radiology on lumbar spinal disorders nor does it covers the entire gamut of imaging in lumbar spinal diseases. It gives a glimpse of the art of interpretation of lumbar spinal MR images needed for day to day practice. It fills the gap between the theory and practice of lumbar spinal imaging, aimed primarily at busy medical practitioners. This pocket book contains only examples for broad spectrum of lumbar spinal diseases. covering over forty-disease categories.