Osteotomy around the knee is planned toward an anatomical bone correction in less than half of patients.

Introduction: In cases where the femur or tibial deformity is not correctly analysed, the corrective osteotomies may result in an oblique joint line. The aim of this study was to assess the preoperative deformity of patients due to undergo corrective osteotomy and the resulting abnormal tibial and femoral morphologies after the planned correction using 3D software.

Methods: CT scans of 327 patients undergoing corrective osteotomy were retrospectively included. Each patient was planned using a software application and the simulated correction was validated by the surgeon. Following the virtual osteotomy, tibial and femoral coronal angular values were considered abnormal if the values were outside 97.5% confidence intervals for non-osteoarthritis knees. After virtual osteotomy, morphological abnormalities were split into two types. Type 1 was an under/overcorrection at the site of the osteotomy resulting in abnormal bone morphology. A type 2 was defined as an error in the site of the correction, resulting in an uncorrected abnormal bone morphology.

Results: The global rate of planned abnormalities after tibial virtual osteotomy was 50.7% (166/327) with abnormalities type 1 in 44% and type 2 in 6.7%. After femoral virtual osteotomy the global rate was 6.7% (22/327) with only abnormalities type 1. A lower preoperative HKA was significantly associated with a non-anatomical correction (R=0.12, p<0.001) for both femoral (R=0.06, p<0.001) and tibial (R=0.07, p<0.001) abnormalities.

Conclusion: Non-anatomical correction was found in more than half the cases analysed more frequently for preoperative global varus alignment. These results suggest that surgeons should considered anatomical angular values to avoid joint line obliquity.

Level Of Evidence: III; retrospective cohort study.