Intraoperative Assessment of Bone Cuts to Guide Surgical Technique During Total Knee Arthroplasty

Correction of deformity with bone resection matched to the thickness of the prosthesis is a required surgical placement (Fig. 1). Current instrumentation used during total Cstrategy to achieve a well-functioning total knee re-knee arthroplasty consists of external jigs that surgeons manually align to achieve proper bone cuts and implant position. However, alignment errors of 3° to 5° can occur, contributing to improper component and limb alignment. Verification of templating and instrument alignment can be approached intraoperatively with a low-tech method (i.e., measuring the removed bone with calipers and recording the measurement on a pathway grid) or a high-tech method (i.e., computer-assisted surgical navigation). Such intraoperative measurement of bone resection during total knee arthroplasty creates a pathway for identifying surgical errors early in the decision-making process, when it is easy to make compensatory adjustments with the remaining cuts. This aids the identification of the location and timing of compounding errors.