Imaging of the postoperative spine requires the identification of several critical points by the radiologist to be written in the medical report: condition of the underlying cortical and cancellous bone, intervertebral disc, and musculoskeletal tissues; location and integrity of surgical implants; evaluation of the success of decompression procedures; delineation of fusion status; and identification of complications. This article presents a pictorial narrative review of the most common findings observed in noninstrumented and instrumented postoperative spines. Complications in the noninstrumented spine were grouped in early (hematomas, pseudomeningocele, and postoperative spine infection) and late findings (arachnoiditis, radiculitis, recurrent disc herniation, spinal stenosis, and textiloma). Complications in the instrumented spine were also sorted in early (hardware fractures) and late findings (adjacent segment disease, hardware loosening, and implant migration). This review also includes a short description of the most used diagnostic techniques in postoperative spine imaging: plain radiography, ultrasound (US), computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance (MR), and nuclear medicine. Imaging of the postoperative spine remained a challenging task in the early identification of complications and abnormal healing process. It is crucial to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the imaging modalities to choose those that provide more accurate spinal status information during the follow-up. Our review is directed to all health professionals dealing with the assessment and care of the postoperative spine.

Objective To identify and evaluate the indexed studies that allow us to understand the implications of imaging studies in MRI and PET/CT related to COVID-19 research. Methods Scoping review. Articles in PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science (WoS) were scanned from 2019 to 2021 with COVID-19, MRI, and PET-CT as keywords. EndNote software and manual checking removed the duplicated references. Our assessment includes citation, bibliometric, keyword network, and statistical analyses using descriptive statistics and correlations. Highlighted variables were publication year, country, journals, and authorship. Results Only 326 papers were included. The most cited article reached 669 cites; this number represented 21.71% of 3081 citations. The top-15 cited authors received 1787 citations, which represented 58% of the total cites. These authors had affiliations from ten countries (Belgium, China, France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom (UK), and the USA). The top-30 journals were cited 2762 times, representing 89.65% of the total cites. Only five journals were cited more than 100 times; Int J Infect Dis had the most significant number of citations (674). Some of the unexpected keywords were encephalitis, stroke, microbleeds, myocarditis. Conclusion COVID-19 pandemic is still spreading worldwide, and the knowledge about its different facets continues advancing. MRI and PET/CT are being used in more than 50% of the selected studies; research trends span seven categories, no only the diagnostic but others like socio-economic impact and pathogenesis Developed countries had an advantage by having hospitals with more resources, including MRI and PET/CT facilities in the same institution to supplement basic assessment in patients with COVID-19. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40336-021-00460-x.

Background: Until recently, Russia did not utilize noninvasive fractional flow reserve (FFR) assessment. We developed an automated algorithm for noninvasive assessment of FFR based on a one-dimensional (1D) mathematical modeling. Objective: The research aims to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of this algorithm. Methods: The study enrolled 80 patients: 16 of them underwent 64-slice computed tomography – included retrospectively, 64 – prospectively, with a 640-slice CT scan. Specialists processed CT images and evaluated noninvasive FFR. Ischemia was confirmed if FFR < 0.80 and disproved if FFR ≥ 0.80. The prospective group of patients was hospitalized for invasive FFR assessment as a reference standard. If ischemic, patients underwent stent implantation. In the retrospective group, patients already had invasive FFR values. Statistical analysis was performed using GraphPad Prism 8. We compared two methods using a Bland–Altman plot and per-vessel ROC curve analysis. Considering the abnormality of distribution by the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, we have used Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. Results: During data processing, three patients of the retrospective and 46 patients of the prospective group were excluded. The sensitivity of our method was 66.67% (95% CI: 46.71–82.03); the specificity was 78.95% (95% CI: 56.67–91.49), p = 0.0052, in the per-vessel analysis. In per-patient analysis, the sensitivity was 69.57% (95% CI: 49.13–84.40); the specificity was 87.50% (95% CI: 52.91–99.36), p = 0.0109. The area under the ROC curve in the per-vessel analysis was 77.52% (95% CI: 66.97–88.08), p < 0.0001. Conclusion: The obtained indices of sensitivity, specificity, PPV, and NPV are, in general, comparable to those in other studies. Moreover, the noninvasive values of FFR yielded a high correlation coefficient with the invasive values. However, the AUC was not high enough, 77.52 (95% CI: 66.97–88.08), p < 0.0001. The discrepancy is probably attributed to the initial data heterogeneity and low statistical power.