Related Experiment Video
Updated: Mar 11, 2026
Three-dimensional Navigation-guided, Prone, Single-position, Lateral Lumbar Interbody Fusion Technique
Published on: July 15, 2021
A radiographic analysis of cage positioning in lateral transpsoas lumbar interbody fusion
Timothy L T Siu1, Elmira Najafi1, Kainu Lin1
1Department of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Clinical Medicine and Health Sciences, Macquarie University, Australia.
Abstract:
Direct Lumbar Interbody Fusion (DLIF) and eXtreme Lateral Interbody Fusion (XLIF) are the most common surgical platforms available for performing transpsoas spinal fusion but no study has been carried out to compare them. We evaluated 21 DLIF and 22 XLIF cage positions by measuring the distance between the posterior vertebral border and the centre of the cage normalised to the midsagittal length of the inferior end plate. We found that DLIF cages were significantly more anteriorly located than XLIF (0.65 vs 0.52, p = 0.001) at L4-5, suggesting that XLIF would permit implantation of wider cages than DLIF.
