Reconstruction of the Knee Joint

More than 20 years have passed since the International Symposium on Total Knee Replacement was held in London in 1974. Prosthetic design and operative technique have been greatly improved since then, and there is now an accepted standard concept of total knee arthroplasty. Thirteen years after the London symposium, another international symposium on total knee replacement was held, this time in Nagoya, Japan, in 1987. Its ambitious objective was to push forward the frontiers of continuous investigation and improve- ment of total knee replacement. The fruits of the individual efforts presented at the Nagoya symposium were published in a volume of proceedings entitled Total Knee Replacement. In the years since 1987, further investigations have been conducted in various parts of the world regarding prosthetic design, fixation, long-term radiological follow-up, biomechanical evaluation, and biomaterials research. In knee ligament reconstruc- tion, rapid progress has been made in the past five years in clinical practice and fundamental research by means of arthroscopic surgery and tissue transplantation, and we have come close to establishing a standard treatment. Under these circumstances, an international symposium on knee joint reconstruc- tion was planned for 1994, again to be held in Nagoya, to provide ample opportunity for exchanging information and sharing clinical experience from around the world.