Management of intraoperative contamination of anterior cruciate ligament graft

The options after the intraoperative graft contamination include sterilizing and implanting the graft, rejecting the graft and isolating another one from the other knee, rejecting the graft and using an allograft. The survey was prepared in Google Forms®. Only fully and correctly completed survey questionnaires were considered and included in this study. In total, 41 questionnaires in the study reported contamination. For the surgeon, the risk of contaminating the graft during the surgery is 0.2%. The mean contamination rate is 1.2 accidents per whole career. The statistical significance was observed in correlation between years of specialization and several accidents (p<0.05). The graft contamination may be experienced by almost 30% of surgeons performing ACL reconstructions. Neither knowledge, nor experience and training can prevent an operating team from that situation. The only solution is to follow a strict protocol of graft preparation. According to the data gathered in this study, there is still no ideal protocol after the incident occurs.