Preoperative diagnostic protocol to predict candidates for unicompartmental arthroplasty

Two hundred eight prosthetic knee arthroplasties were evaluated prospectively with a preoperative diagnostic protocol, the unicompartmental osteoarthrosis (UO) protocol. This is the first series of a preoperative diagnostic protocol able to predict localized osteoarthritic findings at surgery with reliability. The protocol was developed to accurately predict which osteoarthritic patients would be appropriate candidates for unicompartmental arthroplasties or high tibial osteotomy. The UO protocol reliability predicted which patients had isolated unicompartmental changes at surgery, allowing for the use of unicompartmental arthroplasties or high tibial osteotomy rather than tricompartmental prosthetic arthroplasty in 207 of 208 arthroplasties.