Spinal cord injury

How is a spinal cord injury diagnosed?
In many cases, the full extent of a child’s spinal cord injury isn’t obvious right away. That’s why it’s crucial that you obtain a diagnosis from a qualified medical professional as soon as possible.

Here at Children’s, our trauma specialists will perform a comprehensive physical exam on your child and obtain a detailed account of how and where his injury occurred.

Next, doctors may order any or all of the following:

• blood tests
• X-rays, which use small doses of radiation to take pictures of a part of the body
• magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a combination of electromagnets, radio frequency waves and computers that takes two-dimensional and three-dimensional images of the spine and other body structures
• computed tomography (CT) scans, a non-invasive procedure that uses x-ray equipment and powerful computers to create detailed images of the spine, spinal cord and other body parts