Minimally Invasive Total Knee Arthroplasty-The Evolution of a Most Commonly Performed Surgery in 21st Century

With the aging global population, the consequent diseases of the joints have become a very important issue all over the world. Among all the joints in the human body, the knee joint is a very important joint for daily life. Diseases such as osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis may lead to a situation where the knee cartilage is damaged, causing pain and deformation in the joint. When conservative treatments of such conditions of the knee fail, surgical treatments are applied. Such treatments include partial or complete replacement of the joints with an artificial joint. This kind of procedure is called knee arthroplasty. A complete replacement of the tibia and femoral condyles of a knee is called total knee arthroplasty (TKA). In this paper, we present an introduction to minimally invasive total knee arthroplasty (MIS TKA) and compare it with conventional TKA.