Free Elbow CT Viewer for Radial Head and Coronoid Fractures

Getting From Disc To Report

Why An Elbow CT Gets Ordered After The X-Ray

A plain X-ray is where every elbow injury starts, but the elbow is a tight hinge of three bones meeting at once, and overlapping shadows on a flat film routinely hide exactly how a fracture is shaped. CT gets ordered when the X-ray shows a radial head or neck fracture but the surgeon needs to know the fragment count and displacement before deciding between fixation and replacement, or when a coronoid fracture is suspected, because the coronoid is a small buttress that a lateral film alone rarely images clearly. The same logic applies to olecranon fractures with intra-articular extension and to terrible-triad injuries, where radial head fracture, coronoid fracture, and elbow dislocation occur together and surgical planning depends on understanding all three at once.

CT is also the tool for questions an X-ray cannot answer on its own: whether a loose bone or cartilage fragment is sitting inside the joint after trauma, whether heterotopic ossification, bone forming in soft tissue where it should not, is developing after a severe injury or dislocation, and whether the joint stays properly aligned after a closed reduction. After surgical fixation, CT is the study that checks screw and plate position, confirms the joint surface is restored, and screens for early signs of hardware loosening or nonunion, all detail a follow-up X-ray alone tends to understate.

What An Elbow CT Dataset Actually Contains

An elbow CT scan comes off the scanner as a helical run of sub-millimeter axial slices covering the radial head, coronoid, and olecranon, and the same raw data gets reconstructed twice: a sharp bone kernel for crisp cortical margins around the three articulating surfaces, and a softer kernel that quiets the noise the bone kernel would otherwise dump into the capsule and surrounding muscle. The voxels come out isotropic, so the sagittal and coronal planes built from that single pass keep full resolution, and a comminuted radial head or coronoid fracture can be spun as a 3D surface render that shows fragment position from angles no single flat slice can offer.

What The Viewer Puts In Your Hands

Making Sense Of The Report Wording

Elbow CT reports lean on a handful of recurring phrases. “Mason classification” grades a radial head fracture from a simple undisplaced crack to a comminuted fracture with joint destruction, and the grade drives whether the surgeon fixes the fragment, replaces the radial head, or treats it nonsurgically. “Terrible triad” describes the combination of radial head fracture, coronoid fracture, and elbow dislocation, a pattern that behaves more like an unstable joint injury than three separate fractures. “Heterotopic ossification” means bone tissue has formed inside soft tissue around the joint, usually after a severe injury or dislocation, and can eventually limit motion if it bridges across the joint. A post-fixation report reads “hardware position” against the screw and plate locations, flagging any lucent halo that would point to early loosening.

Where CT Stops And MRI Takes Over

Bone geometry is where CT wins outright: fragment count, joint alignment, hardware placement, and how well an osteotomy or fracture has knit together all read clearly off a CT slice. Hand the same slice a question about the collateral ligaments, the common flexor or extensor tendon origins, or the cartilage capping the capitellum, and it comes up short — those tissues blend into one soft-tissue gray that only MRI's soft-tissue detail can pull apart. A torn collateral ligament or an early capitellum osteochondritis dissecans lesion often looks entirely unremarkable on CT even while causing real symptoms. That gap is why a terrible-triad or other fracture-dislocation gets its bone mapped on CT first, with MRI added on afterward whenever instability or a cartilage lesion still needs an answer.

Supported Elbow CT Formats

Frequently Asked Questions

3D Rendering For Fracture And Fixation Planning

Because an elbow CT is typically a true volumetric acquisition, it reformats cleanly into MPR and a 3D render rather than losing detail along the way. Spinning the joint in three dimensions makes fragment separation, coronoid buttress size, and screw or plate trajectory far easier to point out to a surgeon than describing the same thing slice by slice — how crisp that render looks still comes down to the slice thickness, spacing, and kernel the scanner used.

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