I.6 Surgical Tools for Minimally Invasive Knee Implants

In sports medicine, surgeons often employ both minimally invasive surgical techniques, or more invasive open procedures to restore joint function and delay or negate joint replacement. In the knee there is a bifurcated approach: either a fully arthroscopic (minimally invasive) procedure can be done to remove damaged cartilage and perform simple palliative/corrective procedures, or the knee has to be opened up in order to implant a tissue graft, or a cell/tissue product to fill in a the damaged area. Recent advances in manufacturing and new synthetic materials have made possible robust but collapsible implants which can be compressed or deformed to fit into the joint space through an arthroscopic procedure, relax into their original shape, and implanted into cartilage. But there is not a good suite of easy to use surgical tools to facilitate this type of minimally invasive implantation in the knee. The aim would be to design a single use, single step introducer which would be used to implant such a device.