Scenes from my work...

[Hurley]

I thought some of you might get a kick out of this. These are still shots from a 3D rendering of a CT scan we did last week. This is of an elbow in an 8 month old basset that has horrible elbow incongruency (ulna quit growing while radius kept growing) with arthritis and also some panosteitis (inflammation of the bone inside the medullary canal) of the humerus.

Too bad I couldn't put up the 3d rendering here as you can grab the elbow and spin it around, zoom in, out, etc, but it's a 15 meg file.

So, here are some screen shots from that model of the elbow. The pathology was so impressive I thought I'd share. The purpose of this CT was to determine if the ulna had a normal-enough notch to allow us to lengthen the ulna and bring the elbow back into congruency. In this case, doing that would probably make him worse, since he's formed a "pseudonotch" where his anconeal process (the point at the top of the notch) is supposed to be. If we were to force is ulna back up, it would be like putting a 2 inch peg into a 1 inch hole.

Anyway, hope you enjoy...

First up is from the side (labeled and then same shot unlabeled) showing the best view of the incongruency and remodeling of the notch.








Next is a shot looking down on the elblow from above (ulna is down in the photo, humerus is up). It shows an overhead view of the trochlear groove in the humerus and how it's got large osteophytes (arthritis/chunks of bony growth) in where the ulnar process is supposed to ride.







This is a side view from the opposite side. Again, the incongruency is noted. You should not be able to look through a space between the ulna and humerus, that should be flush.





Here is a cool comparison. The one on the left is looking down the medullary canal of the humerus. Within it is a bunch of "gradue" better known as panosteitis. On the right is looking up the canals of the ulna and radius, notice how nice and smooth and empty they are. That's as it should be.