High-Grade Patellar Chondral Defects: Promising Results From Management With Osteochondral Autografts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Patellar chondral defects represent up to 34.6% of defects found during routine arthroscopy. Surgical management has evolved during the past 20 years in an effort to develop techniques to replace hyaline cartilage. Currently, the only technique that achieves this is osteochondral autologous transfer (OAT). Although good and excellent results have often been reported at midterm and long-term follow-up for femoral lesions, little is known about isolated patellar defects. Purpose: To assess clinical and imaging results of patients treated with OAT for high-grade patellar defects. Study Design: Case series; Level of evidence, 4. Methods: This was a retrospective study on all patients who received OAT for high-grade symptomatic patellar chondral defects between 2010 and 2018 at our institution. The study included patients younger than 40 years of age with anterior knee pain and a grade 4 International Cartilage Repair Society patellar chondral defect between 1 and 2.5 cm 2 . Patients with surgery in other knee compartments, concomitant anterior cruciate ligament ruptures, infection, rheumatoid arthritis, and degenerative lesions were excluded. Six months postoperatively, all patients underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to allow assessment of graft integrity via the MOCART (Magnetic Resonance Observation of Cartilage Repair Tissue) score to evaluate morphologic features and integration. Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC) and Kujala scores were used to assess functional outcomes at final follow-up. Results: A total of 26 patients who received a patellar OAT were included. Most patients were male (88.4%), and the mean ± SD age was 28.5 ± 9.7 years. Patellar chondral defects had a median size of 180 mm 2 (range, 64-250 mm 2 ), and patients received a median of 1 autograft (range, 1-3). Functional outcomes assessed at a minimum of 1 year after surgery showed a mean Kujala score of 90.42 ± 6.7 and a mean WOMAC score of 95 ± 3.6. MRI revealed a median MOCART score of 75 points (range, 20-90 points). Conclusion: To our knowledge, this is the largest series to date regarding isolated patellar OAT. At midterm follow-up, most patients reported good and excellent results regarding symptoms and activity levels. Most autografts showed good osseous integration and excellent filling of the chondral surface, as evidenced on MRI. OAT is a good alternative to treat high-grade patellar chondral defects, especially among young patients.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".