Lumbar spinal bony canal measurement in a Palestinian population using CT scan: a ret-rospective study

Purpose: Establishing the normal range of lumbar spinal canal in the Palestinian popula-tion helps provide a quantitative method for assessing spinal canal abnormalities in the lum-bar region. Materials and Methods: The data was gathered from Governmental Hospital in Nablus from January to July 2018. It is a cross-sectional descriptive study among 400 pa-tients (201 males, 199 females), ranging from 20 to 60 years. CT scan radiographs were used to measure the canal and the vertebral body diameters to obtain the canal body ratio. Results: The results represent the normal ratio of dimensions at each level of the bony lumbar spinal canal. The measurements presented are taken at the level of each lumbar vertebra starting from the 1st down to the fifth lumbar vertebra. It was found that the mean ratio of the spinal canal increases from L1 down to L5. Conclusion: After analyzing each lumbar level's results, the mean ratio of the spinal canal increases from L1 to L5. In addition, there were no signifi-cant differences between males and females regarding the measurement tool.