Welcome to physiogain community, today we are going to help you understand knee xray. To make it possible we need to first know the normal knee xray so that we can differentiate between a bad and a normal knee.
We will also talk about knee anatomy but our focus is to give you the radiological appearance of the knee.
Normal knee xray
Antero-posterior view
This view is in full knee extension, so note the following marking carefully.
- You can see the articular ends of the femur and tibia showing by thin white lines of cortical bone.
- You can see the styloid process and head of the fibula below the knee joint space on the lateral side and are superimposed by the tibia.
- In this case, you can see the spinous appearance on the middle of the upper surface of the tibia called intercondylar eminence of tibias.
- Patella superimposed the intercondylar notch of the femur.
- There is normally 0.5 cm knee joint space (gap cast) due to radiolucency of the articular cartilages.
- The lower end of the femur is superimposed by the patella and appears as a more or less circular translucent shadow with a lower edge lying about 2.5 cm above the knee joint space.
Lateral view
- In this case, we partially flexed the knee and the lateral aspect is placed onto the film.
- Femoral condyles slightly overlapped the intercondylar eminence of the tibia and the spine lies somewhat behind the midpoint of the superior surface of tibial condyles.
- Knee joint space is obscured by the overlapping bone shadows.
- We can see the patella in front of the condyles of the femur.
In case, you want to learn about the anatomy of knee.
If you have any query regarding this article, comment down below.