Mosaicplasty: A Good Alternative for Restoring Focal Chondral Defects of the Knee

Management of articular cartilage defects is still one of most challenging problems between orthopedic surgeons. There are some methods which are claiming to restore cartilage around defects but none is capable to restore 100% hyaline cartilage. It is well known that hyaline cartilage has a poor intrinsec capacity of healing and damage from knee trauma or degeneration results in pain and functional impairment. Important untreated cartilage lesions can lead to debilitating joint pain and degenerative arthritis. There are a lot of techniques used to solve this problem. One of these is transplanting hyaline cartilage from a non weight bearing area of the knee joint to the defect situated in weight bearing area. This consists in harvesting multiple small cylindrical autogenousosteocondral plugs from periphery of cartilage and resurfacing the osteocondral defect. (Mosaicplasty or OATS). This technique developed initially by Hangody it is widely used now.