Abstract
ACL injury causes the knee joint unstable, and effects on sports performance. Therefore, ACL reconstruction is essential to keep their high performance. It is well known that the outcome of ACL reconstruction is strongly related to the placement and orientation of the bone tunnel. Therefore, optimization of tunnel drilling technique is an important factor to obtain satisfactory surgical results. Current procedure relies on arthroscopic evaluation and there is a risk of damaging a blood vessel and a ligament during surgery. It may reduce accuracy and reproducibility of ACL reconstruction. As a postoperative evaluation method, Quadrant method evaluates the placement and orientation of the bone tunnel in X-ray radiography. In this study, we propose a computer-aided surgical planning system for evaluating ACL insertion site and orientation using magnetic resonance (MR) images. We first apply Quadrant method for MR image to determine the ACL insertion site. It also evaluates 3-D spatial relationship between the planning femoral drilling hole and arteries around the femoral condyle. This system has been applied ACL injured patients, and we confirmed that it increases the accuracy and reproducibility of ACL bone tunnel making by evaluating a risk of damaging the surrounding blood vessels and ligaments.
