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At the Master Class in Shoulder Instability course, Albert Lin, MD (Pittsburgh, PA), reviews literature on the expanding indications and patient selection for the remplissage procedure, the concept of near-track lesions, and the utility of the Pittsburgh Instability Tool.

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Anterior Glenohumeral Joint Instability: Literature Review on Remplissage and Hills-Sachs Management

OrthoPedia: Anterior Glenohumeral Joint Instability: Literature Review on Remplissage and Hills-Sachs Management

Obinna O. Adigweme, MD (Orlando, FL), shares how his transition to the iBalance® UKA system has improved efficiency and accuracy in performing partial knee replacements.

Not Hidden

Transforming Your Practice: Benefits of the iBalance® UKA System

The eye balance has a lot of advantages. Number one, it's a gap balancing system. So you make your tibial cut and then you're never really chasing your tail because from there on you can bounce your flexion extension gaps independently. The accuracy is almost 100% whether you're using a lateral fixed bearing uni. You don't have to change it as opposed to a mobile bearing. With this system, it can cover the breadth of all patients and it increases accuracy and increases efficiency. I've never had a patient where I've had to go back revise. I've never had a failure in several years. The clinical outcomes have been phenomenal. Teaching and education, abundant, limitless resources, cadaver labs, everything that you need. Medical education at Arthrex is second to none. It could take someone who does only a few partial knee replacements a year to doing, like me, 15%, maybe up to 20% of their knee replacements as partial knees.

Transforming Your Practice: Benefits of the iBalance® UKA System

Carl T. Hasselman, MD (Bridgeport, WV), demonstrates a bunion correction using the Arthrex Lapidus I-beam plate, and highlights the benefits of the plate and associated instrumentation.

Lapidus I-Beam Surgical Technique

Lapidus I-Beam Surgical Technique

Erik Kubiak, MD (Las Vegas, NV), delivers a modern take on cerclage fracture management. He addresses the common challenges with traditional cerclage cables and the evolution of nonmetallic techniques. Part of this evolution is the development of radiopaque FiberTape® cerclage, and Dr. Kubiak presents cases highlighting the use and benefits of this technology.

A Modern Take on Cerclage With Radiopaque FiberTape® Cerclage

Kubiak from Las Vegas, Nevada. Here to give a modern take on cerclage technique. Cerclage cables in any application of trauma have always sort of carried the concerns about breakage of implants. Issues with fracture security, metal fretting, potential vascular injury as a result of these sharp metal fragments injuring vessels and the proximity, and then particularly in the proximal femur. Third body where where you have little bits of metal from the broken cerclage cables involving themselves or wandering into the articular surface of the hip. Classically, these techniques are used like this to secure the femur, particularly in periprosthetic settings or in implant revision settings. We've sort of struggled with the metal implants and have evolved over the last 20 years to using polymer implants. The first of these was a nylon polymer implant with a polyethylene core. We've really moved away from that implant to a uhmwpe fiber tape implant. Issues with that fiber tape implant on initial presentation, where not everyone was comfortable with an implant they could not see radiographically. Henceforth, the development of a bismuth trioxide impregnated uhmwpe implant, which is radiopaque and leaves evidence of the surgeons activity on radiographs. Postoperatively. Issues with fracture security as demonstrated by the old metal implants. An evolution of that technique to a oraf dominant fixation construct, where the cerclage cables are used for provisional fixation, which is kind of where we've gone. And again, issues with potential metal dissimilarity. The cerclage cable versus the plate, and again, not free of the risks of breakage. And the third body migration into the articular surface. This is the bismuth impregnated uhmwpe material recognizable by its yellow color. And in this circumstance used to reconstruct after a clamshell osteotomy for a Vancouver B periprosthetic femur fracture complex. Periarticular trochanteric femur fracture. Not really amenable to oraf. Raf going to be treated with a total joint arthroplasty. This is the case where we used the cerclage cables to reconstruct the femur around an implant. And as evidenced on these fluoro images, you can see the radiopaque cerclage material quite readily on multiple views of this femur. And then this person, due to some GI distress, ended up with a CT scan almost three months later. And you can see that the cerclage cables are readily apparent on the CT scan as well. Another case 78 year old female poor bone quality sick patient. Pre-existing hip osteoarthritis, which necessitated a total hip arthroplasty. You can see here as circled the presence of the radiopaque cerclage cable fiber tape around the proximal femur. And then on the post-op films on the post-op plain films, again, the readily apparent cerclage cable fiber tape in its location were placed still secure at three months. More and more frequently, we see periprosthetic fracture around the proximal humerus. This is often a almost a more difficult situation than the femur because the bone quality is so poor. We're working to find improved fixation techniques to maintain stability of these fractures and allow patients to regain function in their arm and try to restore bone stock. And these circumstances were now sort of evolved to using allograft bone struts with multiple cerclage tapes for fixation allograft strut prepared with grooves to maintain the position of the cerclage cables when passed, and then application of those as seen in these fluoro images you can see there, they're readily apparent radiopaque fiber tapes or collage around the implant, both in the fluoro and in the post-op period, as evidenced here in these plain films. The evolution of this suture material going from a fiber tape cerclage to a fiber spacer collage with its now radiopaque, it results in the same strong fixation readily visible on fluoro radiographs and CT. It has the advantage of being retention able with little to no concern of third body wear, and it's easy on the bone. We don't see the subsurface resorption that we did with the nylon polymer constructs. Thank you.

A Modern Take on Cerclage With Radiopaque FiberTape® Cerclage

The Arthrex Elbow Fracture Plating System provides a comprehensive portfolio of distal humerus and olecranon plates. Designed to treat all fractures, the set comes with KreuLock™ locking compression screws, allowing the surgeon to both reduce the plate to bone and compress across a fracture. The plating portfolio is perfectly complemented by Arthrex soft- tissue procedures and fracture reduction, including LUCL/MUCL InternalBrace™ ligament augmentation, FiberTape® cerclage, and the ElbowLOC® elbow positioner.
The InternalBrace surgical technique is intended only to augment the primary repair/reconstruction by expanding the area of tissue approximation during the healing period and is not intended as a replacement for the native ligament. The InternalBrace technique is for use during soft tissue-to-bone fixation procedures and is not cleared for bone-to-bone fixation.

The Arthrex Elbow Fracture Plating System

The Arthrex Elbow Fracture Plating System

Noman A. Siddiqui, DPM (Baltimore, MD), provides a step-by-step surgical demonstration of the Arthrex MIS Bunionectomy System with the triangulation guide, focusing on critical anatomic landmarks, fluoroscopic cues, and practical tips and tricks. The goal is to shorten the learning curve, improve OR efficiency, and deliver consistent correction, helping surgeons build confidence in adopting and performing minimally invasive bunion surgery.

Building Confidence in MIS Bunion Surgery: Practical Tips, Key Landmarks, and Fluoroscopy Views

Building Confidence in MIS Bunion Surgery: Practical Tips, Key Landmarks, and Fluoroscopy Views

Rachel M. Frank, MD (Denver, CO), demonstrates an all-inside quadriceps ACL reconstruction using the FiberTag® TightRope® SB implant with the InternalBrace™ technique.&nbsp;
The InternalBrace surgical technique is intended only to augment the primary repair/reconstruction by expanding the area of tissue approximation during the healing period and is not intended as a replacement for the native ligament. The InternalBrace technique is for use during soft tissue-to-bone fixation procedures and is not cleared for bone-to-bone fixation.&nbsp;

All-Inside Quad ACL Reconstruction Using the FiberTag® TightRope® SB Implant With the InternalBrace™ Technique 

I am Rachel Frank, a sports medicine surgeon from the University of Colorado in Denver. This is the all suture ACL reconstruction technique. No metal, no peek. So we will now demonstrate our soft button quad link ACL reconstruction. Here I'm going to demonstrate the harvest through a vertical incision. But you could certainly do a transverse incision if you're more comfortable with that. And we'll make our incision. And then during the incision and exposure one of the most important parts is to get rid of some of this subcutaneous fat. That's how you can keep your incision small while still getting good visualization. We've excised some of the fat, and we're kind of looking down on some of the peritenon on top of the quad. I'll take the Cobb elevator and I do an initial sweep and a second. We're going to switch to the Army navies. An initial sweep of the tissue. And then I'll switch to the Army navies once I take a sponge and get that in there and get really some of that soft tissue off. So then we have a nice view of the quad here straight down. And then what we'll do is we're going to take the scope and a marking pen so we can see the quad coming up. And basically I'll go right there and then I will relax my army Navy I'm going to take it out. I lever my scope up and then we can feel and see the light and we'll make just a little dot. And now I know where to aim to. I'm pulling these quite distal. I'm going to take my quad pro. In this case we're using a size ten. We've marked the end of the Quad Pro with a purple marking pen. And that's going to give us the postage stamp. And I'll start that basically on the superior pole of the quad. You can see in there I'll take the 15 blade knife back. Thank you. And then the pickups, then the Alice. And then one of the pearls here is to stay on the inside of your mark so that you don't harvest too big of a graft. And I do a full thickness harvest. I'm harvesting this right off the superior pole of the of the patella, and I'll actually take my knife as far as my incision allows before I start with the Quad Pro, and then we'll use our suture tape fiber loop next. And sometimes there's a little synovium underneath. So you just have to try to get that away with the knife. So we use the 15 blade as mentioned to harvest the graft from distal to proximal as far as my incision allows. And then we use the quad Pro to finish it up. Here we'll prep the distal aspect of the quad with the fiber loop. And you want to get this nice and tight because this is what's going to be going in the quad Pro. So we have the quad Pro harvester. We'll take the needle from our fiber loop and put this in the tip. And we'll use the weight of the needle to just fall through the harvester just like that. And then this quad pro can be used. You slide this along the quad for as long as you've harvested, and then you're going to go in 360 degree loops either clockwise or counterclockwise. And it's a push pull fashion. Staying parallel to the shaft of the femur. So you can see it's nice and calibrated. Here. I'll turn that up. And my goal is a 65 to 70 graft for nearly all of my patients, from five foot 2 to 6 foot two. If they're a little shorter, I go a little shorter. If they're a little taller, I go a little longer. And then I'll take the graft, keeping it in the window of the quad Pro, pulling the needle back, and then we'll move the Quad Pro without spinning now up because we've already done our cut. And you can see calibrated here. We'll go ahead and take the pushrod insert this in. And again I'm going to do a double check here on the calibration. Make sure I really like it. And I'm holding firm tension on the quad. And I'm doing a push pull. And I like that sound. And when this comes out this should be a nice full thickness graft. Not getting into any muscle a little muscle is okay. But you can see here this is really a nice full thickness harvest. You can see all the layers to the quad. So you can see that that full thickness harvest has been completely closed with the loop link, which again is a very strong luggage tag suture and it's very low profile. This is not going to cause any irritation to the quad tendon. This is not going to cause any irritation or adhesions to the patient. And you can see it's completely closed and there's no gaps whatsoever. So we won't get any fluid extravasation throughout this. You can see the VMO quite nicely. So really nice mid third quadriceps tendon harvest with closure. So here we have the completed quadriceps graft. Again all soft tissue about 65mm in length by approximately ten. Or in this case about nine nine and a half by circumference. And we use this all with all of our instrumentation. We harvested this all and prepped this all. So you can see the only difference here with the fibre tag tightropes is this now has the soft button. So those are the yellow buttons. And you can see those on either side. And we can see this is the femoral side. Because of the internal brace, the tibial abs side will not have the internal brace. And again these yellow portions here are what's new. This is the soft button. All suture. No metal no plastic no peek. Incredible opportunity for us to have a metal free construct for our ACL reconstruction and leave patients with a more natural knee. So now we're going to go ahead and get the graft and the graft tubes to compress it down while we get ready to drill our tunnels. So here now we're compressing the graft typically on the back table. And it's in the graft compression tubes. And we'll try to get this as tight as we possibly can so that we can make this graft as compressed as possible. Taking advantage of the quad, with its full thickness nature and the circumferential fibers, we get a nice cigar like graft, but we want to keep it as compressed as we can. So here's our flip cutter femoral guide. And we can see what's new now is we have a ten millimeter step at the end instead of seven millimeters, which makes this a lot sturdier in the bone and a lot easier to pass our soft button with respect to our fiber tightrope, we have the femoral guide in. So we'll use our flip cutter for our all inside. This is the new power. Okay. So we'll mail it in the ten millimeter step. And then we're going to open and flip. Nine five okay. And the reaming has gone all the way back to the step. And again with that ten millimeter it's just a three millimeter difference. But it provides you just enough to be able to do that without compromising the cortex, which is really nice. It's a really nice addition, small tweak, but big difference. Why don't you take a look at that and we can see our socket and then we can see our step right there, which is really nice. Really nice. All inside ACL femoral socket. So we'll go ahead and pass our snare. We'll retrieve it. Good. All right. Here. We'll take the Apollo just to demonstrate that we've marked our spot for the tibial tunnel. Tibial tunnel. Posterior aspect, anterior horn, lateral meniscus. Use the Apollo to burn that off. We'll get our flip cutter guide. For the tibial tunnel. Good. Perfect. We'll take a mallet. And again, we're going to mail it in this the new bullet here that has a ten millimeter step, which is going to make it super stable in that cortex. And then we don't have to do any math. So we'll go ahead and open the flip cutter to a 9.5. And normally I get about a 25 to 30 millimeter socket. But you don't have to do any math here. And we're just going to ream back to the step. And we're reaming just till we feel that tip of the step so that we know that we're safe on the cortex and we don't have to worry about breaching the cortex. So we'll go ahead and put the snare up and we'll retrieve it. So we'll go ahead and grab the suture snare. And I really like these snares. And it sounds a little corny, but the colors are really nice because they're contrasting the black and of course, the blue. I'm going to switch my camera to the opposite portal. I'm going to go ahead and grab my snare out the opposite portal from the tibial tunnel. Then I'm going to switch my camera back to lateral. We'll go ahead and put our passport in to help with graft passing. And then you've got the tibial side. And then we'll go ahead and get these both out the portal here. So the blue and white is for the femur. The black is for the tibia. Perfect. Okay. Good. And now we're ready for graft passage. So we're going to want to lengthen our tightrope. But you can see here the soft button is a little bit squished. So to get that nice and elongated to make it easier for passing into the socket, we're going to pull the opposite limbs of the the included tiger wire and the fiber wire. And you can see here how that goes from a ball to a nice oblong or even linear shape. To make this easier to pass through your 3.5 hole. Then what we're going to do is lengthen our tightrope. And if I want to lengthen this side here. So we have this side and this side. If I want to lengthen this side I'm going to hold on to the opposite side. Just like that. And that'll prevent this from getting. Bunched up. And then I'm going to go to lengthen the other side. And so now I'll hold the blue sutures the fiber wire. And then we'll go ahead and take the slack out like normal. And that's nice and elongated. Now we can mark it. And again, you can see here even doing that I bunched up the soft button again. So I'm going to take my tiger wire and fiber wire and pull those and elongate the button again to make that easier for passing. So I'll mark the graft here at 20. And usually the way we prep the fiber tag tightrope, it's at 20. But we'll do it. We always measure just to make sure. But yeah the end of the suture is usually right there. And if you can get 15 to 20 in each socket, you'll be perfect with a 65 or even shorter graft length. All right. So we're going to go ahead and mark our interosseous length. And we're calling that about 40. I'm going to put a dot there 3540. Good. And that's on the this is on the femoral side okay. So now we're passing our graft again. This is the internal brace side of the soft button fiber tag tightrope. But we're not going to pass the internal brace that's going to be remaining with the graft. So we're going to go ahead and pass. We're pulling on opposite limbs. The tiger coming out the medial portal and the blue coming out the lateral femur to keep the button elongated. And we're going to pull until we see our marking and kind of feel the button flip against the lateral cortex, which we just felt. And now we're going to make sure that we don't have any tension. And then now we're going to check it. And we are pulling like crazy on the IB. And I'm going to give the graft a little tug. Okay. So we're hooked against the femur. I'm going to give the ibz a little tug. Good. So you can see I'm pulling pretty hard actually. And that soft button is now bunching up against the cortex. We're going to hold tension on the IB, and we're pulling out the lateral femur on the tightrope. And we're going to shuttle about 15 up. Good I would stop there. So we have our graph passed in this femoral socket. We're going to pass everything into the tibial socket except for the tiger wire that's in both the femoral soft button and the tibial soft button. So we're passing everything, including internal brace, but we're not passing those new tiger wires because we're using those to keep the button elongated if we need. We're going to go ahead and shuttle this into our tibial socket. Okay. So now we'll go ahead and elongate by pulling the tiger and pulling the blue. And we're emphasizing here even through the whole tibial tunnel which has a turn here. I can pull on these to make that button nice and elongated. And you can see that here outside. We're going to go ahead and pass our graft into the socket. Good. And we're dunking that down. Let's give it a nice hard pull if we can because we're not quite in yet. Now we can take out our tiger wires that are in each of the buttons. So here's the one on the tibial side. We'll go ahead and just pull that out. It's served its purpose. And again its whole purpose was to keep that button elongated, to get it through the 3.5mm hole from that flip cutter bullet. And now we no longer need that. And same with the femoral side. So that one's been removed. You can see our ACL graft. Looks nice actually looks really nice. Looks really low. That's where we want it. And now we're going to go ahead and tension on the tibial side. So what I like to do here is we'll go ahead and cycle the knee. So we'd hold tension on the graft I got this. We'd go ahead and I'll take the scope out. We would cycle the knee while holding tension on the graft. We cycled about 15 to 20 times and then we get the knee nice and extended. As you can see our button here, we'll take a hemostat. We'll put it in the tightrope just to hold some tension. And then we're going to take both limbs again with the knee in extension so we don't over constrain and we'll start tensioning down our tightrope. You can see the soft button is already starting to bunch up. And I'm getting that oh that's nice nice and tight on the tibia. And then I'm going to move these out of the way. So we're going to go ahead and fix our internal brace with a swivel lock suture anchor using our power. We're going to pass our internal brace sutures through our anchor. And you can see here we've got the knee in full extension. That's really important step. And then I'm pulling tension. And then I'm just going to let it dunk right in. And then we'll go ahead and mail it this in. So then what we can do is what I like to do is I'll actually put the scope back in and I'll take a look at the graft and then we can retention. And I like to do my graph tensioning last. And what we can do here is we can see do we want to do a little more tension on the femur or tibia. And I'd like to do the femur here. So we'll get the leg back in extension. Good. Just like that a little less extension. Good right there. And then we're going to go ahead and tension retention. Look at that. We can see we're getting a little bit of creep out of here which is awesome. Good perfect. And we'll come back down to resting position. And now our graft is complete. This is rock solid. This is something I'd be happy to have in any one of my patients. And I would be very confident that they'd be able to fully return. I mean, I'm literally pulling on this. This is awesome. The other nice thing about this is there's absolutely no metal within this construct whatsoever. When they see their x rays, they're not going to see any metal in their knee. They're going to feel like this is a more normal graft. This is a more normal knee and we know that the psychologic, the mental and emotional part is just as important as the physical and biomechanical part. And all of this is incredibly strong, incredibly biomechanically robust. We're going to have a great final product. Okay. So we can see here our final fixation with the soft button. We can see that the soft button is really conformed nicely against the anterior cortex of the tibia here. Incredibly low profile. Again no metal no plastic. Really going to be a nice a nice final result for the patient. And then if I move the tightrope tensioning limbs out of the way, we can see that the internal brace Fibertape sutures are going nicely down into that swivel lock suture anchor again, nice and compressed against the bone. And we have this beautiful low profile, metal free, all suture construct for this all inside ACL reconstruction.

All-Inside Quad ACL Reconstruction Using the FiberTag® TightRope® SB Implant With the InternalBrace™ Technique&nbsp;

At the Arthroplasty Evolutions course, Asheesh Bedi, MD (Ann Arbor, MI); Patrick J. Denard, MD (Medford, OR); Brian C. Werner, MD (Charlottesville, VA); Anthony A. Romeo, MD (Chicago, IL); and Evan S. Lederman, MD (Phoenix, AZ); provide literature-based consensus statements from the Shoulder Arthroplasty Research Committee (ShARC) regarding various surgical considerations in both anatomic and reverse total shoulder arthroplasty (TSA).

Shaping Arthroplasty Outcomes With ShARC Consensus Statements

OrthoPedia: Shaping Arthroplasty Outcomes With ShARC Consensus Statements

Justin W. Griffin, MD (Virginia Beach, VA), presents a case and details a technique for suprapectoral biceps tenodesis using the Knotless FiberTak® Biceps anchor.

Case Presentation: Suprapectoral Biceps Tenodesis Using the Knotless FiberTak® Biceps Anchor

I'm Justin Griffin from Virginia. I'm excited to share with you a new development in my management of the biceps tendon for my patients, the Knotless FiberTak biceps. First, I'd like to share with you a case of a patient that I chose to manage the biceps in a particular way. This is a 68 year old active female with right shoulder pain. She had pain for several years, had failed conservative treatment. She was very active with different activities including gardening. She started to lose sleep and then she started to have problems with her functional activities due to pain on her exam. She had a difficulty with range of motion. She also had a positive O'Brien's with some biceps groove tenderness, a little bit of weakness in her rotator cuff and also some limitations with range of motion. Here's your MRI. You can see on the MRI that she has not only a rotator cuff problem, but also at her superior labral attachment. We can notice that she has a tear. She could, of course, have a superior label repair, but this would not be my choice for her. A debridement alone could be considered, but I don't think it would completely manage her pain. And then we could of course, consider a tenodesis, which is what we chose in this patient. The knotless FiberTak biceps offers a number of advantages. First, it creates a very small drill hole. Second, it's very simple and efficient, and it creates a strong repair through an interlinked double loaded knotless mechanism. So the way to perform this is first I pin the biceps through a spinal needle in an intra-articular manner. Then I release the biceps with arthroscopic scissors. You can also release the biceps with your Apollo, which creates perhaps less bleeding. And you can see that we can do this very efficiently here in the joint. Next I'll bring the shoulder into forward elevation. I'll really identify in the sub deltoid space where my portal should be. We create an inverted triangle between our anterior or lateral and our anterior inferior biceps portal. We'll create this and then place a passport cannula for efficient suture management. Once we have our passport in place, we can identify the biceps and really skeletonize it in the groove. We can see that we're working medially and laterally here. We have to pay careful attention to the little things. We don't want to get a great deal of bleeding, which makes the procedure more difficult. And we want to avoid violating the sub deltoid fascia. That's where the passport really I find helpful. Once we have our space managed quite well, we can then sweep the biceps more laterally, place our drill guide into the biceps groove, and we can feel the guide falling directly into that biceps groove. Then my assistant will efficiently place this anchor in a cortical manner. Once she enters through that one cortex, you can see that we place the anchor directly into the bone, and then we're ready to manage our sutures. The next step, as you can see, is we go ahead and grab the white suture directly around the biceps. This is going to serve as our loop. We can then take our passing device. Pass this directly through the biceps and retrieve it on the other side. We want to take a really good bite of the biceps. I try to enter directly through the central portion of the biceps, and then pull the suture up. And then we're ready to manage this. Sometimes I'll pull the loop down just a little bit to allow me to be able to see the loop better, to manage it on the other side of the biceps. Our next step is we're going to grab our other suture, which goes into the other Knotless Knotless mechanism. As we know, this is a double loaded knotless anchor. We can then retrieve our blue suture through the white loop. As you can see here. This is then loaded onto the passing suture. And we can then tension this down to obtain stout fixation in an interlinked way. I always like to look at my repairs. When I'm complete, I'll move my scope to anteriorly. As you can see here, we're going to move the scope anteriorly. And we'll be able to see that this is a very stout repair in an orderly fashion, and all we have left to do is remove the proximal unhealthy biceps. I typically will take a KingFisher and grab the biceps, elevate it up because it was moved in an anatomic fashion. And then subsequently I'll take that portion of the biceps out and we're completed with our biceps. Tenodesis Postoperatively I keep all of my patients in a sling for four weeks. We begin active range of motion at that point, but we're not starting any strengthening until six weeks. In this case, we've highlighted the fact that there is an easy and efficient way to manage the biceps in an interlinked knotless way. We've created an on lay biceps tenodesis and takes advantage of the optimal length tension relationship. This is also a knotless repair, which makes it efficient, smooth, and seamless in your operating room. Thank you for your attention.

Case Presentation: Suprapectoral Biceps Tenodesis Using the Knotless FiberTak® Biceps Anchor

John G. Kennedy, MD (New York, NY), demonstrates a minimally invasive approach to treating anterior and lateral ankle impingement using the NanoNeedle™ scope 2.0, ApolloRF® SJ50 probe, dissector shaver blade, and round burr.

Anterior and Lateral Ankle Impingement Using the NanoNeedle™ Scope 2.0 and NanoResection™ Devices

Hi, my name is Doctor John Kennedy. I'm an orthopedic professor at NYU Langone in New York. We're going to be talking today and showing the new 2.0 nano needle, and we're going to be looking at it specifically in the ankle joint at the anteromedial impingement and anterolateral impingement. And today we're going to be going how do we diagnose this. And also how do we fix it. So we're just inserting this Apollo SJ 50 which is this new and improved radiofrequency ablation device. You can see already that there is a little suction on it, which is very helpful just to pull in the particular tissue that you're looking for. We're using the handheld device here. And we just do small little bursts. And you can see how effective this is. And the other thing is when we remember the old device you remember all those bubbles that you would get. And of course you don't see that here. So just short burst in very short order. We've taken away most of that scar tissue there, and you don't have to be aggressive here at all. Just these short pulses. Clean up that scar tissue in no time, and then occasionally we'll need to go back in and use the the shaver to clean up any of the the necrotic tissue left afterwards, and you can see how effective that is. So we have now moved our camera onto the lateral side. So we have good visualization over medially. You can see one of the things that I noticed really with this 2.0 upgrade is that anytime you have flaring of the light that the onboard sensor actually reduces that. So you don't get those flare outs that you see in a traditional scope. So I think for many reasons, this 2.0 and nano needle is really a massive advancement by comparison to standard arthroscopy. So here on this particular patient you can see that there is contour irregularity. There's a large fibrous and bony impingement here. And of course this is very common in soccer players and runners. So this is true anteromedial impingement. It's a combination of both bone and soft tissue. And this is where Nano is really exceptional for in-office procedures. And you can see right across over into the medial mal. And we're going to be resecting all of that while the patient is wide awake and being part of it. And one of the great things is when you do this in, the patient is awake as you're resecting this and you ask them to move, they get that tactile feedback. They feel that their joint is so much freer than it was before. So we used again the standard 3 or 3.5 shaver. And the first thing we're going to do is just, again, take away all of that soft tissue that we can see there. And fluid management is key here. The pump is typically at around 35mm of mercury. And you'll adjust that as you need to. But you can see that if we put too much suction on this, we can really pull in all the soft tissues. So that's not great. So as we're taking away this soft tissue things to be aware of around here, we don't want to shave upwards. That's where all the name structures are. We want to keep away from that. So you can see that the cutting or the action part of this blade is always facing down, sweeping down the neck of the talus. And there's that exostosis that will be causing some impingement. We'll take that away. It's relatively small in this patient, but we'll be taking that away with a both a shaver and a burr in one moment. So patient or people always ask how much soft tissue or how much bone do you resect. Well the answer to that is on the tibial overhang, which is here. You really want to be getting that flush with the anterior aspect of the medial malleolus which is here. So we're taking away all this soft tissue. And this will bring in the anterior border or the anterior fascicle of the deltoid which is here. And again, as we know the deltoid is a very, very strong robust ligament. And I think we can afford to take some of those fibers away to prevent recurrence. So we're just now going to swap over to a bur. We've taken away all that soft tissue and you can see that already. And there's less soft tissue impingement. And now we're going to go to a bur to actually remove part of this. Almost do a plasty here. So this is a typical this is what we would do normally in office. All of this is done with a patient wide awake and being aware of what's happening all the time. So with the birds, we know the technique for bur is constant motion. We never keep the bur in one place for any period of time. You don't want any troughing to occur, but you're constantly moving it around and taking away millimeter by millimeter. That anteromedial aspect of the joint keeping the horizon. Stable so that you you can always see where the joint is. Avoiding any iatrogenic iatrogenic injury to the cartilage underneath. So again we're just constantly moving that back looking to where our marker is, which is the anterior border of the medial mal. So constantly moving. And again you can see as I'm doing this there are milliseconds of flaring as the as the camera moves in and out. There will be flaring and some glare from the from the sheath of the bur. And then the sensor onboard sensor corrects that right away so you get a constant picture. So we always take a little bit more than you would need on the basis that the body doesn't tolerate a dead space. So it will try to fill this in with, with some scar. Postoperatively. But if you take a little bit more bone then the likelihood of that scar causing any pathology is very low. So then we move over on to the anterior border of the The medial mouth, and we'll take a little bit more bone from there. We don't have to be too aggressive on this. In this particular case, there's not a big overhang. But you can see the tibia now is in line with that anterior border. So that's enough resection on this. Oftentimes you can be here for quite some time taking this away. And then you can swap swap out to A40 shaver if you need to be a little bit more aggressive. But that's pretty good. Now one of the things that we all learn from our mistakes, and one of my fellows, when we're operating on a soccer player, told us I thought the case was over. And he said, well, we should really look down here onto the neck and down here. There was a very large exostosis. So I've always remembered that case that we always want to look onto the neck and again, using the bur, being careful to shield the soft tissues away from this, the cutting blade. And again constantly moving this around. To avoid any troughing. This is typically where you will find a large exostosis on the medial neck, so always look for that. But again, you can see that any time I move the camera in a little too close, so there's a flare or glare off that sheath, the onboard sensor immediately recognizes that and brings you back to a normal picture. The great thing about in-office needle arthroscopy is the patient is awake, and you can ask them now to move their ankle into a dorsiflexed position so you can truly see that there is no impingement there any longer. And more importantly, they feel that. And I think that's the buy in from patients we've published on this to show that patients really do like this procedure and that they understand what's going on, and then they can titrate their activities post-surgically based on what they've seen at the time in a realistic fashion. So I think it's very, very helpful in that way.

Anterior and Lateral Ankle Impingement Using the NanoNeedle™ Scope 2.0 and NanoResection™ Devices

The PARS Achilles Midsubstance SpeedBridge™ implant system is a percutaneous, minimally invasive technique used to repair Achilles tendon ruptures. Using color-coded 1.3 mm SutureTape, the PARS system makes it easy to create a percutaneous locking stitch in the Achilles tendon, while staying inside the paratenon sheath.

Achilles Midsubstance SpeedBridge™ Surgical Technique

When using the parse jig for the Achilles mid substance SpeedBridge technique, a percutaneous incision is made in a transverse manner just proximal to the palpable rupture. Alternatively, a small longitudinal incision can be utilized. The tendon is grasped and the jig is inserted with the inner arms inside the peritoneum of the Achilles tendon. The first parse needle is placed in the number one hole in the jig to stabilize the construct, while passing the other needles and sutures in sequential order. Lastly, the white SutureTape is then passed through hole number one. The jig can then be removed, which pulls the sutures out of the incision. Separate out each of the five sutures, the white, blue, and black suture tapes, as well as the two green and white FiberLink sutures. Each suture should be tested by pulling light tension through ten cycles to confirm appropriate hold in the tissue. On both sides, past the blue SutureTape under and around both green and white. Fiberlink SutureTak twice and back through the loop, then advance each loop back through the tendon using the free end of the green and white FiberLink sutures. This creates the locking stitch. Two stab incisions are made one centimeter below the superior aspect of the posterior calcaneal tuberosity. Medial and lateral to the Achilles tendon. Within these two stab incisions, insert the guidewire utilizing the drill guide with the white centering sleeve at 45 degrees from the centerline of the Achilles in the coronal plane, and 45 degrees from posterior to anterior in the sagittal plane. Guidewire placement can be checked under fluoroscopy. These two holes are drilled with a 2.6mm drill and tapped for later SwiveLock insertion. A banana. Suturelasso is passed through the distal stump of the Achilles and out of the rupture site. The SutureTape from the proximal portion of the tendon are then passed through the distal stump and out of the stab incisions distally. The suture tapes are then loaded through the eyelet of the Rd 3.9 biocomposite SwiveLock anchors. The foot is plantar flexed 10 to 15 degrees to approximate the tendon ends. The SwiveLock anchor is placed into the prepared hole to secure the suture tapes. The laser line feature on the SwiveLock shaft can be utilized to confirm when the anchor is flush, or two millimeters countersunk. The same steps are repeated for the suture tapes on the contralateral side. The incision is closed. Jumpstart antimicrobial dressing can be utilized and the result is a secure knotless repair of the Achilles tendon rupture.

Achilles Midsubstance SpeedBridge™ Surgical Technique

The Mini Fragment System is designed to aid in the reduction and fixation of small- and long-bone trauma injuries. The modular tray offers screw and plate options in 2.0 mm, 2.4 mm, and 2.7 mm variants. With a wide array of plates to fit a multitude of trauma needs, the Mini Fragment System is a keystone addition to the Arthrex Trauma portfolio.

Mini Fragment System Animation

Mini Fragment System Animation

Paul J. Cagle, MD (New York, NY), demonstrates a tunnel-free acromioclavicular repair using the AC FiberTape® cerclage implant system.

AC Repair Using FiberTape® Cerclage

I'm Paul Cagle, a shoulder and elbow surgeon from New York City at Mount Sinai. Today we're going to talk about how to perform a tunnel less AC cerclage. Ac repair. As you'll see here, this is going to demonstrate a no tunnel technique where we're going to have no knots stack superiorly. Let's see how we got this done. This technique allows for a single mini-open approach. This is going to be approximately a three to 3.5cm incision that extends from the superior aspect of the coracoid roughly to approximately about the mid clavicle. And that allows exposure for both the coracoid passage and ultimately the clavicle passage. And this technique today we'll be demonstrating this without drilling any tunnels. So this will be a tunnel less approach. There's a layered exposure utilized for this technique. After our three centimeter incision we're going to identify our fascial planes, which you can see I'm grasping here. Typically a longitudinal opening is performed along the clavicle, which allows us to elevate and clear the clavicle so that we have access to the posterosuperior aspect of the clavicle for later passage. The corners of our deltoid are then elevated and a small T is created. You can see here that we've tagged those corners as I'll show you, and that's for later. Reapproximation and repair. This is the AC cerclage kit we're going to rely on for an AC repair or an AC reconstruction. Let's go through the contents. So here we have the contents of the AC cerclage kit laid out. And this kit really has everything you're going to need to tackle, even the simple or complex AC cerclage indications. And so we see we have two sutures here. One has a needle and one doesn't have a needle. And that really does come in handy sometimes in those areas that may be a little bit more difficult to pass, or be a little bit of a tighter space for your indications where you may choose to go transosseous with a button, the kit comes with a 2.4mm drill and a dogbone button, so the kit comes with convenient passes. Our Transosseous suture passer. Here there is a passer that utilizes a nitinol guide wire, and then we have a separate passer that's very helpful for getting around the clavicle. We have our mega loader, and conveniently that's going to come with a suture tape fiberlink as well as a tiger link. That way you can keep your sutures separate and identified if you're going to be passing a graft as well. When I go to pass a graft, I do like to dilate or make sure I have the space to get that graft around my coracoid and around my clavicle. And the dilating passer here will help you do that without a lot of extra dissection. Finally, the single use tensioner is going to be used today to get that reduction to hold it and ultimately get our alignment in the AC joint. So now let's head over to the patient and fix the pathology. Because this patient's habitus we're going to utilize the smaller passer. And we're going to go from medial to lateral for safety. So here we're going to pass this from medial to lateral. And many times we can use an army to simply expose that aspect laterally. And we're going to wiggle this through until we're through the soft tissue. And then advanced our suture which is going to be used for ultimate passing. In the occasion you need additional clearance around our coracoid we can utilize a dilator, and this dilator is going to provide increased clearance and clearance around the medial and lateral aspect. So in this case we will again pass from medial to lateral. I'm going to pass our dilator. And that demonstrates easy passage around our coracoid. Our dilator then can act as the final suture passer. And so we're going to take now our cerclage suture. We're going to pass this through our dilator and pass this again for safety purposes. Medial to lateral. The next step is to pass the end of our cerclage around the clavicle. It's important to pass this from anterosuperior to posteroinferior. That allows the suture to come out inferior to the clavicle, placing the knot inferior, decreasing the risk of soft tissue irritation. Again, the clavicle passer here is an opportune instrument to pass the suture. We'll identify our clavicle. We're going to pass our suture. Around. As you can see, we're going to wiggle this free until some of that soft tissue is off of our instrument. We'll then take our end of our suture. We're going to pass this through. And that will again pass. So ultimately the knot is going to be inferior to the clavicle. At this point we need to ensure that this is shuttled. And so we're going to carefully reduce this so that we bring the knot mechanism as close to the patient as possible. And we'd like to make sure the tension on the sutures is equal. As you can see, we're going to work a little bit of that slack out here. And it gives us excellent control of our clavicle. Next we'll simply pass our suture. And this is going to be reduced to the pre-tied knot mechanism. And again, it is nice to be able to get the slack out of this system and to reduce this along the inferior clavicle, as we're seeing here. Now, at this point in time, I sort of consider this procedure almost done, because the tensioning device we're going to use next is ultimately going to assist us in providing our final reduction. We now have our tensioning device. We will take one limb of the suture and pass it through the eyelet. And the second limb of the suture is going to pass just directly adjacent to this. And this is going to be brought directly down onto the knot. At this point in time you would like to obtain. A good tight fixation. And so we're going to tension these. Each sequentially on each side. And now we're going to just make small turns. And it's important to keep an eye on your clavicle and your construct to ensure you're watching your reduction as this goes. We'll see. Here is there's demarcations along the back of our tensioning device. And you can see as we release tension, those go in. As we increase tension we'll see our second line. The majority of the time to obtain good AC joint reduction, we are typically going to get to roughly our fourth line. We're going to continue to attention here. As you can see, we're getting close to the fourth line here. And we'll see now is we now have rigid reduction of our AC joint. Sometimes, as we can see here, there's a bit of soft tissue creep that occurs as that suture compresses along the periosteal surface of the bones. It's important to identify that because you're going to want to get that extra quarter turn or half a turn to make up for that compression from the very rigid fixation the AC cerclage allows. So next we're going to take our sutures off, and we're going to throw a half hitch not to tension this down. We'll bring. It's important to unscrew our tensioning device because that allows us to regain our tension. We'll slide back. We are going to throw a half hitch, and then this becomes an extremely elegant tensioning knot pusher. I'm going to bring this down here. We'll bring this directly adjacent. And again we simply repeat the steps of tensioning again ensuring that we have good wrap on each side so that there is ideal tension. Now at this point in time our fixation is done. We can back this up with numerous series of half hitch nuts given, as you see, that suture has brought our not far inferior to the clavicle. At this point we would simply cut. We've obtained our reduction.

AC Repair Using FiberTape® Cerclage

Tim R. Lenters, MD (Grand Rapids, MI), highlights the latest metal segmentation feature in the Virtual Implant Positioning™ system while planning a challenging glenoid revision with significant bone loss using the Augmented Modular Glenoid System.

VIP Vision™: Episode 11—Metal Segmentation for Revision Planning

Hi, my name is Tim. I'm a shoulder surgeon in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I've been using the VIP system now for over ten years, and I'm happy to share a case presentation that highlights some new features of the planning software. The planners can now perform metal segmentation on your surgical plans for use in revision cases of existing implants. So what previously used to require potentially several surgeries, with the first surgery being removal of an existing implant to allow us to obtain a clean CT scan, that first step is no longer needed with metal segmentation features of the VIP system. I'd like to use this case to highlight some of those features on the platform. My patient is a 68 year old. She's fairly low demand female. She had a reverse total shoulder arthroplasty five years prior to her presentation with me. She describes one month of progressively worsening pain in her shoulder, and she has also had a few falls over the last year, although none of these falls led to a significant worsening of either pain or function of her shoulder. I was able to find her x rays from her early postoperative period. She has a reverse total shoulder arthroplasty with a lateralized glenoid sphere. It seems to be an appropriate position in terms of the RSA angle, as well as in relation to the inferior scapular neck or x rays. On presentation to me, show a catastrophic failure of the base plate with fracture of all three of the fixation screws, and in my mind, I felt it was essential to rule out the possibility of an indolent infection, despite her history of some falling onto the shoulder. I did do an infection workup. Her inflammatory markers were normal, including the SED rate, the CRP, and her white count. I also aspirated the shoulder to culture and the cultures did not grow. Any organisms at three weeks or vitamin D level was also checked and found to be in the low range of normal. The CT scan was also obtained and I found it somewhat challenging to observe what sort of bone was remaining into the glenoid vault on this axial cut. I can just appreciate that there's bone loss and maybe some residual bone inferiorly. The coronal image shows a fairly large defect here, and raise some concerns about my ability to utilize a standard implants for this reconstruction. I did decide to upload this image to VIP software to see if potentially, I'd be able to utilize a standard implant for this reconstruction. So at this point, I uploaded the study to VIP, and we'll go through sort of a live planning session to demonstrate the features of the system. You can see the old existing implant is green. You can see the existing screws in the vault. The planners have been able to identify those structures and highlight them with these blue outlines. The surgeon can easily toggle visualization of these features with this little window on the right side, and this will make the implant disappear. And what you see then is what's left of the scapula. And it's fairly obvious that there's a very large posterior defect in this glenoid vault, sort of an uncontained wall defect. The vault is missing. You can see there's maybe a little bit of bone remaining in the base of the coracoid process. There's a nice column of bone anteriorly and maybe some bone inferiorly. You also can see that perhaps the scapular spine is available to use asphyxiation. So in my mind at this point I had really three options. One option would be to utilize the scapular line for fixation, to try to sink the post of the base plate down the spine of the scapula. Second option in my mind was to use Grammont principles and Medialize. And inferiorly lies the sphere to try to minimize the shear along the back side of the implant. And then my third option would be to develop and manufacture some sort of a custom implant, which is my which would be my least preferred option. So my first option was to look at use of the alternate scapular plane. And if we bring that implant in, what I thought was the alternate scapular line here you can see the post is seated in the base of the scapular spine. The windows on the left side here can show you what sort of bone is available on either side of your central post, and there seemed to be a nice quarter of bone in this position. The top window gives you sort of a coronal view, and here you can start to appreciate where the glenoid might reside in relation to the inferior scapular. And I did have some concerns with the position of this implant. I was worried about this bone posterior inferiorly that the humeral cup might impinge on that bone. And so this looks like it might be an option in terms of fixation of the center post. I did have some concerns about the overall position of the glenoid in relation to this inferior glenoid neck. So I looked at another option, which would be more of a Grammont principle to digitalize and medialize the sphere. And you can see in this position, if I remove the sphere itself, the base plate seems to be seated reasonably well. I have 53% backside contact with just a non-augmented base plate. The post seems to be seated in a nice area of residual bone, both on the axial plane as well as on the coronal plane. The sphere looks to be in a better position in relation to that posterior inferior scapular neck. And so in my mind, this seemed like a very reasonable option. I did want to utilize some other features on VIP. So if we look at the range of motion module, we can see that in this position there may be some issues with impingement of the humeral cup against some remaining bone around this sphere. And so it would be useful, I think, at this point, to utilize the Osteophyte removal tool to remove some of that bone and see if we can improve the range of motion. You can use that tool from this window. So I'll go through some of those steps right now. Remove some of these potential sources of impingement. We can reassess the range of motion following this bone removal. And this is something I would do in surgery if I see sources of impingement. I'll just simply take a roger and remove some of these problem areas. But once we do that, we can reassess now the range of motion we'll bring in the humeral component one more time. There's a nice abduction. We've improved her abduction. External rotation seems to be moving more freely without impingement until 41 degrees of external rotation. Internal rotation seems free. So I thought this would be a very good reconstruction. At this point, I finalized the surgical plan by hitting the subscribe button. Prior to surgery. So the planners were able to develop a surgical plan. These images show the 3D targeter on the patient's scapula, and you can see we could get four of the peripheral legs to seat very nicely, with the standard two legs wrapping around the front rim and the two other feet sitting on the face of the existing glenoid bone. And I was surprised, somewhat surprised to see how well this transfer technology worked in the patient, and how well the surgical plan mimicked the actual anatomy that was encountered at the time of surgery. At the time of revision, I did use some bone croutons to graft some cavitary defects from the screw tracks. I did not encounter any evidence of a chronic infection. There was no biofilm. There was no Seroma noted. I did take five sets of tissue cultures, understanding that this might represent a chronic infection, but I felt I was able to achieve a durable reconstruction that mimicked my surgical plan very nicely. You can tell that based on the overall position and fairly with a little bit of overhang of the sphere in relation to the neck. I think the center post nicely aligns with the floor of the suprascapular fossa, and I like my position on the anterior posterior plane as well, with the sphere sort of covering that posterior glenoid rim. So at latest follow up the patient shows a stable reconstruction with improving clinical metrics. I do believe that the newest capabilities of the VIP system allowed me to plan this case, and feel comfortable with the use of standard implants. Vip turned what could have been a challenging and uncomfortable situation into a definable problem with a definitive solution. I encourage you to make use of this system if you see failed shoulder implants. I believe it will help you plan your surgical plans and optimize your patient outcomes. Thank you for allowing me to present this case.

VIP Vision™: Episode 11—Metal Segmentation for Revision Planning

Anand Vora, MD (Chicago, IL), presents a detailed overview of clinical evidence supporting evolving treatment techniques for insertional Achilles tendinopathy.

Insertional Achilles Tendinopathies: Literature Review on Evolving Insertional Achilles Treatment

OrthoPedia: Insertional Achilles Tendinopathies: Literature Review on Evolving Insertional Achilles Treatment

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OrthoPedia: Anterior Glenohumeral Joint Instability: Literature Review on Remplissage and Hills-Sachs Management

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