Cervical disk degeneration and herniation: diagnosis by computerized tomography.

Computerized tomography (CT), which has revolutionized the diagnosis of intracranial disease in less than a decade, has made substantial progress in spinal diagnosis in the last few years. It is rapidly becoming the preferred technique for the diagnosis of lumbar disk herniation and is applicable to cervical disk diagnosis, although there are some important technical differences. Over a three-year period my group has performed 468 cervical CT studies. A comparison between the myelographic and the CT findings in 144 of these cases indicates that CT equals the accuracy and exceeds the sensitivity of myelography in the diagnosis of cervical disk herniations.