Development of a universal surgical guide to perform low invasive knee surgeries

Summary form only given. The human knee, which is a mobile pivotal condylar join that permits flexion, extension and a slight internal and external rotation, is the largest join in the human body. The ligaments of the knee provide stability, limit the knee movement and help to protect the articular capsule. The anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), one of the four main ligaments of the knee, is extremely important in the stabilization of the knee when turning or planting. The rupture of the ACL is one of the most common knee injuries, where the surgical procedure for its reconstruction is done through arthroscopy, a low-invasive surgery performed using a small camera, an arthroscope. In case of injury an orthopedist surgeon evaluates the ligament damage, and thus he chooses the patient bone site to drill in order to insert a previously harvested tissue that will substitute the damaged ACL. The success of this surgical procedure depends mainly on the surgeon ability and skill to drill accurately the holes in the bone, since non-anatomic bone tunnel misplacement has been reported as the most common cause of ACL reconstruction failure. With this, and, using a patient specific instrumentation (PSI) systems, that is being developed as a replacement for traditional instrumentation in total knee arthroplasty (TKA), this study intends to adapt this in-developing technology to ACL repair surgery. Using the PSI concept to precisely locate the femoral tunnel location during the procedure, a guide item will be generated using 3D anatomic information gathered from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and/or computed tomography (CT) imagery. In the end, the present proposal aims to deliver a prototype for a universal surgical guide, capable to assist low-invasive knee surgeries for the ACL reconstruction. Thus, in the course of the reconstruction surgery, this universal surgical guide will permit to mark the exact location of the bone drill, as planned in the pré-surgical study.