Minimally invasive surgery for unicondylar knee arthroplasty: The intramedullary technique

Abstract

Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) for unicondylar knee arthroplasty (UKA) was instituted in the early 1990s by John Repicci [1, 2]. While there had been a long history of UKA dating back to the early 1970s [3-6], the techniques and surgical approaches were modeled after total knee arthroplasty (TKA). The results were not equal to TKA, and many surgeons abandoned the procedure. The MIS approach introduced a new method to perform the surgery and helped to improve the results by emphasizing the differences between TKA and UKA. MIS forced the surgeon to consider UKA as a separate operation with its own techniques and its own principles.