In-Office 3D Weight-Bearing Imaging of Foot and Ankle

These images here are what you would see with a traditional x-ray where you're seeing the foot in two dimensions. You can see it from different angles, the top or the side but we can't see down inside the foot. For example, if we wanted to specifically look at this joint here or this joint here that on a two-dimensional x-ray is overlapped it's very hard to do that.

In fact, it's really impossible to do that. But with the 3D imaging, we can do a couple things. First of all, we can look at the foot in this way where we can see all the way around where you can see a lot better down in the joints here. You can look at this from all different angles if you wanna do it from the top, the bottom, the side.

But more importantly is if you really wanna isolate one of these joints, like this joint here, for example we can go to this view, which is gonna be basically right in this section of the foot and we can zoom in on that and if we bring that over we can scroll through every one of these midfoot joints. So the area before that I was circling that was very hard to see was actually this joint right in here.

And now we can isolate that and we could see if there's any tiny fracture or narrowing or something that would be completely missed on a plain film X-ray. It's also really helpful if you're looking at toes because the same thing happens in the toes when you're looking at a plain film X-ray from the side and we'll go back to that to show that.

So a plain film x-ray from the side because it's compressed in two dimensions even if we zoom way in, we still can't see the second toe the third toe, the fourth toe, we can see the big toe but I can't see anything else. When we go to a similar type view on a 3D imaging you can see that we can see every single little bone and every joint that's down in there.

And we can go through each toe individually to be able to look at really everything specifically in that area, every joint, every cortex just one bone at a time. So this is very impressive technology that really lets us not only see things that we couldn't see but a lot of times we can see things that are missed that other people haven't been able to diagnose just because they can't see it.