Management of Knee Cartilage Defects with the Autologous Matrix-Induced Chondrogenesis (AMIC) Technique

Abstract

The arthroscopic findings of knee articular cartilage lesions are reported to be as high as 60%, although only a fragment of these are considered to be symptomatic. Such lesions are believed to accelerate the onset of arthritis. Long-term results of the microfracture technique for chondral and osteochondral defects of the knee cartilage are not satisfactory. The autologous matrix induced chondrogenesis (AMIC) technique offers a promising alternative as an effective cartilage repair procedure in the knee resulting in stable clinical results and with a wide range of indications. An extensive literature review has been performed aiming at providing the rationale behind AMIC, to report clinical results of AMIC and to compare AMIC with other chondrogenesis techniques. Finally, we comment on the appropriate surgical technique and its indications, since the number of onestep arthroscopic procedure proposals is steadily increasing.

Treatment of Knee Osteochondral Fractures

“…The matrix scaffold can be manufactured from Hyalograft C (Fidia Advanced Biopolymers, Abano Terme, Italy) [ 21 ], type I/III collagen membrane (Genzyme) [ 22 ], or type I collagen membrane (Arthro Kinetics Biotechnology GmbH, Krems an der Donau, Austria) [ 23 ]. Although the success of the marrow stimulation technique is directly linked to location and lesion size (less than 2 cm 2 ) [ 24 ], cell-based repair procedures are effective for large and bipolar lesions [ 25 , 26 ].…”