Dr Greg Keene -- Knee Surgeon Australia: News

New Knee Replacement
Date: Jan 21, 2001

The giant international health group Johnson & Johnson invited Dr Keene and 7 other experienced knee surgeons (4 Americans, 1 French, 1 German and 1 New Zealand) to join a team of engineers and scientists from their prosthesis company DePuy, specifically to design and develop a new partial joint replacement that will solve some of the problems associated with current MIU joints. These are difficult and inaccurate surgical instrumentation and lack of choice in bearing surface options. Dr Keene was invited due to his extensive experience with unicompartmental surgery beginning in 1985 and involving 1000 cases. He is a leading member of the team and wrote the surgical technique manual. The team commenced work with their first meeting in London in Feb 2000 and have since met 4 times (Singapore, Los Angelesx2, Leeds). The team will meet again in Sept 2001 in Indianapolis and several times in 2002. The revolutionary new joint has been implanted for the first time in Adelaide and Indianapolois in June this year and will be seen internationally in late 2001. Already the new joint is showing superior behavior to the previously used joints.

New results of ACL reconstuctions
Date: Apr 13, 2001

Authors Yunes, Richmond, Engels and Pinczewski from Boston & Sydney in the March 2001 edition of 'Arthroscopy' published the results of a 'Meta-analysis' of 4 papers involving 411 patient accurately comparing the results of ACL reconstructions done using either the patella tendon (PT) OR hamstring tendon (HS). Their results prove that the PT patients had a a 13% higher chance of a stable knee on instrumented testing and a 20% greater chance of a successful return to sport (this difference was statistically significant).

New Techniques for ACL Reconstruction
Date: May 5, 2000

At the recent World Congress in Sports Medicine the SPORTSMED.SA Research Fellow Dr. Mark Bowditch presented a new technique developed by Dr Keene for anchoring Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction grafts. The new method involves impacting a wedged shaped bone plug attached to the graft into a circular tunnel in the tibia bone. This is self-locking and eliminates the need for any implanted fixation device.

Dr Keene said that the new method was simpler, faster, cheaper and avoided the risk of fixation devices interfering with the graft.

The conference at Junipers on the Gold Coast was attended by hundreds of Orthopedic surgeons from around the world who were treated to dozens of presentations over 4 days from leading global Orthopedic researchers.

Dr Keene and his colleagues Dr Paterson and Dr Spriggins from SPORTSMED.SA had a total of 8 presentations on the lower limb to provide easily the largest contribution from an Australian group.

DISCLAIMER: Not all knee conditions are described in this text and not all cases of the conditions described fit the descriptions given above. People with knee symptoms should use these descriptions as a guide only and seek expert opinion. They should not make decisions concerning investigation and treatment based on these descriptions.