Background: The increasing amount of revision surgeries in total hip arthroplasty (THA) represents a burden for orthopedic surgeons given the complexity and unpredictability of this kind of surgery. The aim of the current study was to develop a new radiographic classification of acetabular bone defects stratify the severity of the lesion and to suggest the surgical strategy to address it.
Methods: Radiographs of 151 consecutive patients who underwent acetabular revision surgery in our institution were collected to develop a new classification that groups the acetabular bone defects in three zones (A, B and C). The performance to predict treatment and inter- and intra-rater agreement were evaluated.
Results: The ability of the newly proposed classification to predict treatment was 87.3% (k weighted: 0.65). The inter-rater reliability was 90.1% (k: 0.81), and the intra-rater reliability between the two sets of evaluations performed by the observer at 1-month distance was 97.5% (k: 0.94).
Conclusions: The newly proposed classification was able to characterize the extent of acetabular bone defects and predict pre-operatively the appropriate surgical treatment strategy in 87.3% of cases. It showed a strong agreement among raters and an almost perfect agreement among different measurements at 1 month distance. This new tool could be used in the preoperative assessment to drive the use of secondary level image examinations and the type of surgical management.
Keywords: Acetabular bone defects; Hip; Hip arthroplasty revision.
© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.