A radiographic analysis of cage positioning in lateral transpsoas lumbar interbody fusion

Timothy L T Siu; Elmira Najafi; Kainu Lin

doi:10.1016/j.jor.2016.10.028

A radiographic analysis of cage positioning in lateral transpsoas lumbar interbody fusion

J Orthop. 2016 Nov 22;14(1):142-146. doi: 10.1016/j.jor.2016.10.028. eCollection 2017 Mar.

Authors

Timothy L T Siu¹, Elmira Najafi¹, Kainu Lin¹

Affiliation

¹ Department of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Clinical Medicine and Health Sciences, Macquarie University, Australia.

Abstract

Direct Lumbar Interbody Fusion (DLIF) and eXtreme Lateral Interbody Fusion (XLIF) are the most common surgical platforms available for performing transpsoas spinal fusion but no study has been carried out to compare them. We evaluated 21 DLIF and 22 XLIF cage positions by measuring the distance between the posterior vertebral border and the centre of the cage normalised to the midsagittal length of the inferior end plate. We found that DLIF cages were significantly more anteriorly located than XLIF (0.65 vs 0.52, p = 0.001) at L4-5, suggesting that XLIF would permit implantation of wider cages than DLIF.

Keywords: Cage position; Lateral transpsoas; Lumbar vertebrae; Spinal fusion.