![]() |
|||||||||||||
|
Vertebral body |
| Bone: Body of vertebra | |
|---|---|
| A typical thoracic vertebra, viewed from above. (Body visible at top center.) | |
| A cervical vertebra. (Body visible at top center.) | |
| Latin | corpus vertebrae |
| Gray's | subject #20 96 |
The body is the largest part of a vertebra, and is more or less cylindrical in shape.
Its upper and lower surfaces are flattened and rough, and give attachment to the intervertebral fibrocartilages, and each presents a rim around its circumference.
In front, the body is convex from side to side and concave from above downward.
Behind, it is flat from above downward and slightly concave from side to side.
Its anterior surface presents a few small apertures, for the passage of nutrient vessels.
On the posterior surface is a single large, irregular aperture, or occasionally more than one, for the exit of the basi-vertebral veins from the body of the vertebra.
Contents |
Severe compression fractures of a vertebral body or a tumour in the region of the spine sometimes require the replacement of a vertebral body by an implant. The loads on such an implant are not well known. In order to measure these loads, a vertebral body replacement was instrumented to allow the in vivo measurement of forces and moments acting on the implant. A multi-channel telemetry transmitter developed at the Julius Wolff Institut (Charité - Berlin) was placed into the cylinder of the implant together with 6 load sensors and a coil for the inductive power supply. Usually, the spine is additionally stabilized from dorsal by an internal spinal fixation device. The implant loads were measured in some patients for many activities of daily living.1
This article was originally based on an entry from a public domain edition of Gray's Anatomy. As such, some of the information contained herein may be outdated. Please edit the article if this is the case, and feel free to remove this notice when it is no longer relevant.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||