Late stage medial unicompartmental osteoarthritic disease of the knee can be treated by either Total Knee Replacement (TKR) or Unicompartmental Replacement (UKR). As a precursor to the TOPKAT study this work tested the postulate that individual surgeons show high variation in the choice of treatment for individual patients. Four surgeons representing four different levels of expertise or familiarity with partial knee replacement (UKR design centre knee surgeon, specialist knee surgeon, arthroplasty surgeon and a year six trainee) made a forced choice decision of whether they would perform a TKR or UKR based on the same pre-operative radiographic and clinical data in 140 individual patients. Consistency of decision was also evaluated for each surgeon 3 months later and the effect of additional clinical data was also evaluated. The sample consisted of the 100 patients who had subsequently undergone UKR and 40 who had undergone TKR.Purpose
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