Saw this very nice post today with beautiful, labelled schematic illustration of the craniocervical junction. And I think having an understanding of these structures is very important. And most of us have visited these diagrams routinely throughout our career and our eyes strain to merge the color illustration to the actual scan in front of us. Maybe you feel this way-but I have to ask, with millions of actual CT and MRI images out there, can't we find a few images that show these ligaments very well without a such an nice but oversimplified illustration? I mean if someone shows you the stapes, do you need another diagram to understand and see it? I guess my point is- It's not that easy to identify these structures in the reading room using conventional CT and MRI. We understand where they are and what they do but we don't always "see" them. The tectorial membrane for instance is easily depicted on the illustration- should be easy, but in real life the membrane is fused with the ventral dura, and on a real MRI you can't distinguish the membrane from the dura. Yet we point to the MRI and tell the resident "there's the tectorial membrane". And most of us have little or no idea what our own sensitivity or specificity (how reliable we are) for recognizing injury to these individual structures. Often we have no feedback mechanism to know if our observations are correct. Most radiologists including me seem to rely on variety of secondary findings: the most important one is osseous alignment or osseous relationships. Soft tissue edema or fluid collections are other indicators that help build our conclusions regarding soft tissue injury. We love fractures of the cervical spine, and we love obvious dislocations or subluxations that indicate overt ligamentous injury like a complete disruption, but don't ask us to agree on individual ligamentous injury without contributory signs and other information. So if you feel uncomfortable calling out traumatic injuries to these "schematic" structures, you are not alone. I personally will be bookmarking this one.