R. Julliard et al., COMPUTER-ASSISTED RECONSTRUCTION OF THE ANTERIOR CRUCIATE LIGAMENT, Clinical orthopaedics and related research, (354), 1998, pp. 57-64
Reconstruction of the anterior cruciate ligament is a delicate task fo
r which many different techniques have been proposed, A system consist
ing of a computer and a three-dimensional optical sensor is proposed t
o help the surgeon control the placement of a graft. This system can b
e used to minimize anisometry of the graft and avoid notch impingement
. The same system, which had been validated by previous testing on 20
fresh human anatomic specimen knees, was tested on 23 patients who had
an anterior cruciate ligament injury, Tunnel placement was performed
using the standard technique of Morgan et al and was measured with the
computer based system. It was found that all cases had different conf
igurations of tibial and femoral placement, The computer based anisome
try measurements ranged from 1.9 mm to 8.8 mm in the anterior part of
the graft, and from 1 mm to 13 mm in the centers of the tunnels. Using
the computer retrospectively, it was possible to find configurations
of the graft in all cases that avoid notch impingement, with anisometr
y values ranging from 1.3 mm to 3.7 mm, This study shows that a comput
er based system can be a useful tool for routine anterior cruciate lig
ament reconstruction and can be useful for research purposes.