Intraoperative kinematic protocol for knee joint evaluation.

Although knee kinematics has been investigated widely, no standard, objective evaluation of the kinematics behaviour of the joint is used at present during surgical treatment. We propose a kinematic protocol for a manual intraoperative evaluation of the knee behaviour, with which the range of motion, the 'screw-home' mechanism and knee instabilities could be quantified. The method does not require anatomical landmarks, because it is computed from standard tests used in clinical practice and gives a decomposition of the knee movement comparable to the well known Grood and Suntay analysis [E.S. Grood, W.J. Suntay, A joint coordinate system for the clinical description of three-dimensional motions: application to the knee, J. Biomech. Eng. 105 (1983) 136-144]. We describe the protocol, report the evaluation of its numerical features and provide a comparison with Grood and Suntay method on ten porcine knees.