Contemporary Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction

Abstract

The modern era of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction started in the early 1990’s with the development of arthroscopic knee reconstruction procedures. Early on, graft fixation issues and, graft choice have been extensively debated. Then, the transtibial technique appeared (Rosenberg & Deffner, 1997; Chen et al., 2003). This was an easy and quick way to reconstruct the ACL which became soon adopted by most surgeons. However, the outcome was not always as good as expected (Freedman et al.,2003, Lewis et al., 2008) and with the re-discovery of the ACL anatomy and biomechanics, deep changes have been introduced in the way to reconstruct the ACL. This chapter reviews the main features related to ACL reconstruction and focus on the current state of the art in this field