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Salter-Harris 3 in the Knee

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Let's look at another

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injury involving the physis.

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Here we have multiple projections of the right

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knee in a 14-year-old boy with a knee injury.

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Here is a frontal projection.

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We notice that there is a lucency right

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here going through the epiphysis of the

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distal femur, sort of separating the

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lateral condyle from the medial condyle.

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And the line goes just like this

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over here and hits the physis.

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And I can sort of visualize that this

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physis on the medial side may be slightly

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wider than the physis on the lateral side.

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Remember, the physis is a disc-shaped structure,

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so you're actually seeing two projections, one

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barely over here and one over here, because

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you're seeing one surface versus the other,

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um, as we sort of obliquely view the image.

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But over here, I can imagine that this

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physis may be slightly wider than the

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physis, either one of these physes

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on the right, on the lateral side.

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Let's see how obliquity helps us.

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Here's an oblique view, and we can see

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that component of the epiphysis much better.

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Not only do we see that, but we also

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see the little fragmentations here,

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so it may be somewhat comminuted.

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And we have, again, entering the physis,

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maybe slightly widening of that medial physis.

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Hard to say what's going

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on the lateral physis.

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For that, we've got the other obliquity.

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On the other obliquity, the fracture

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line really is very different.

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Difficult or impossible to see.

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So this sort of illustrates another point.

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When we do have knee injuries, sometimes

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a simple frontal and lateral view may

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not be adequate to show you the injuries.

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You may need to get oblique views to really

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profile everything that needs to be seen.

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So this obliquity doesn't help us very much.

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Finally, here's a lateral view.

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On the lateral view, we don't

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see the fracture so well.

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But what we do see, maybe we see a little bit

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over here, it's hard to say, but what we do

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see is this huge joint effusion over here.

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And it's a very dense joint effusion.

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It has an effusion that's similar

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in density to the soft tissues around it.

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And the rest of the knee looks okay.

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In the next vignette, we'll go over

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how this looks both on CT and on MRI.

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Faculty

Mahesh Thapa, MD, MEd, FAAP

Division Chief of Musculoskeletal Imaging, and Director of Diagnostic Imaging Professor

Seattle Children's & University of Washington

Tags

X-Ray (Plain Films)

Trauma

Pediatrics

Musculoskeletal (MSK)

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