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Clarity in Motion. Confidence in Diagnosis.
Spine pain often outlasts the imaging used to evaluate it. Standard X-rays and MRIs show the spine at rest, not how it behaves when patients bend, move, or load their joints. The ligament injuries that drive instability live in motion. When those injuries go unseen, patients stay in pain, care plans stall, and outcomes suffer.
VMA®, Vertebral Motion Analysis, changes this dynamic. It visualizes the spine during controlled movement and measures how each vertebra translates and rotates under stress. The study identifies ligament damage and segmental instability with precise, objective data. You see the true biomechanical source of symptoms, not assumptions based on static images.
Why Traditional Imaging Falls Short
Static imaging is not designed to detect mechanical failure.
- MRIs and X-rays capture the spine at rest, not under load.
- Ligament sub-failure injuries remain invisible without motion.
- Adjacent segment compensation can mask the actual level involved.
- “Normal” imaging can delay referrals, prolong symptoms, and hinder accurate care.
How VMA Strengthens Your Clinical Decision-Making
Identify the Real Pain Generator
Spinal ligament injuries create abnormal motion patterns that irritate joints, overload discs, and compress nerve roots. VMA quantifies these patterns with sub-millimeter accuracy, giving you a clear path to diagnosis.
Improve Treatment Precision
Motion data helps you match the right intervention to the right patient. Manipulation, therapy, injections, bracing, or surgical referral are all more effective when the biomechanical failure is known.
Guide Level-Specific
Spinal ligament injuries create abnormal motion patterns that irritate joints, overload discs, and compress nerve roots.
Support Medical Necessity
Objective motion data strengthens documentation and helps justify care plans, referrals, and escalations in treatment.
Prevent Long-Term Degeneration
Ligament injuries alter loading and can accelerate disc and facet breakdown. Early identification supports proactive management, not reactive care.
Why Motion Matters in Spine Care
Pain happens in motion. Instability happens in motion. Functional failure happens in motion.
Static imaging cannot capture these events, which is why VMA often reveals what other tests miss.
With VMA, you see:
- Excessive translation
- Abnormal angulation
- Loss of segmental control
- Motion patterns tied to symptoms
- Levels at risk for future degeneration
This data empowers you to provide answers when patients have been told “everything looks normal,” but still cannot function.
Patients respond when providers explain the source of their pain with clear, visual proof.
VMA helps you shorten the diagnostic timeline and deliver treatment plans that finally move the needle.
Faster Answers, Better Outcomes
Patients respond when providers explain the source of their pain with clear, visual proof. VMA helps you shorten the diagnostic timeline and deliver treatment plans that finally move the needle.
Required Physician Forms for Patient Appointments
To refer a patient for a VMA study at TruePath Imaging, please download and complete the Physician Referral Form and the Health Insurance Claim Form.