CT Scans for Knee Injuries and Other Knee Conditions

Audrey Spielmann, MD FRCP(C), discusses knee CT scans.

The knee injury is one of the most common injuries that we see in many different types of sports.

It's frequently a pivot shift-type injury or a twisting-type injury to the knee.

So we see that in running sports, soccer.

We see it with rugby, football and commonly as a ski injury when the ski doesn't come off.

And what the CT scan looks at is the bony abnormality and so we can, if there is any concern of a fracture within the bone - a tibial plateau fracture would be a common type of fracture that can be subtle sometimes on plain X-ray.

That's what we would look for with the CT scan, and it does compliment MRI very nicely where we look at the bone injury with CT and we look at the soft tissue injuries with the MRI.

This is an example of a knee CT scan, and this is a patient who has had a previous ACL repair or anterior cruciate ligament repair.

We can see the component from the ACL repair and the tunnel within the tibia, and this patient has sustained another knee injury.

And so what we're looking at with CT are all the bone fragments that are identified within the joint.

There are many bone fragments in this patient's joint.

I'm just going to show you the three-dimensional images that we can produce.

This is an image of the femur that has been removed from the tibia, and we can rotate that around and make sure that there's no fracture arising from the femur.

This is the other part of the knee, the tibia, and we can see the bone fragments within the knee joint so this patient would need to have the bone fragments removed.

I would imagine that he has a history of locking of his knee.

And CT scan allows us to visualize the bone really well and to assess for subtle bone injuries or small bone, loose bone fragments within the joint.

If you have any questions on CT of your knee, contact your family doctor, your sports medicine specialist or an imaging center.