Artifacts in MR Imaging of the Spine and Spinal Cord

This article reviews common MR imaging artifacts encountered in spine imaging and emphasizes their clinical relevance, as artifacts may degrade image quality or mimic spinal pathology, postoperative complications, or cord lesions. It outlines practical clues for distinguishing artifactual findings, including extension beyond anatomic boundaries, appearance limited to specific planes or sequences, and absence of expected associated disease. Artifacts are organized by mechanism: motion-related artifacts such as bulk motion and cerebrospinal fluid pulsation with flow-related ghosting; field inhomogeneity-related artifacts including chemical shift types 1 and 2 and susceptibility from metallic hardware; and sampling or protocol-related errors such as Gibbs truncation, aliasing, partial slice-overlap saturation, and zipper radiofrequency interference.