A novel surgical technique to perform total knee arthroplasty in patients with inaccessible femoral medullary canal.

Not seldom Surgeons have to deal with total knee cases where the femoral intramedullary canal is not accessible due to hardware still in place, long hip stems or diaphyseal mal-unions, so intra-medullary referenced instrumentations cannot be employed. We developed a novel instrument called EMAS (Extra Medullary Alignment System) able to help addressing those cases in a simple and reproducible way avoiding the use of more complex and expensive technologies. We present the results achieved using EMAS on 18 of those difficult cases with a maximum follow-up of 7 years as well as our experience using EMAS in our standard practice.