Despite increasing use of bone graft in Malaysia, there was still lack of data to quantify knowledge level on bone banking among orthopaedic community who are involved in transplantation related work. Therefore, a survey on awareness in tissue banking specifically bone banking, usage and choice of bone grafts was conducted. From 80 respondents, 82.5% were aware about tissue banking however only 12.5% knew of the existence of tissue banks in Malaysia. Femoral head was the bone allograft most often used as a substitute to autograft. Only 34.8% respondents preferred irradiated bone grafts whilst 46.9% preferred nonirradiated, indicating the need to educate the importance of radiation for sterilising tissues. Exhibition was the most preferred medium for awareness programme to disseminate information about bone banking in the orthopaedic community. The professional awareness is necessary to increase the knowledge on the use of bone graft, hence to increase bone transplantation for musculoskeletal surgeries in the country.

Introduction: Anatomical femoral tunnel placement is critical for anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (ACLR). Tunnel placement may vary with different surgical techniques. The aim of this study was to compare the accuracy of femoral tunnel placement between the Anteromedial (AM) and Anterolateral (AL) visualisation portals on post-operative CT scans among a cohort of ACLR patients. Materials and methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted from January 2018 to March 2020 after obtaining ethics clearance. Patients who went for arthroscopic ACLR in our institute were divided into an AM (group 1) and an AL (group 2) based on the visualisation portal for creating the femoral tunnel and a 3D CT scan was done. The femoral tunnel position was calculated in deep to shallow and high to low direction using the Bernard Hertel grid. Femoral tunnel angle was measured in the 2D coronal image. Statistical analysis was done with the data collected. Results: Fifty patients with an average age of 26.36 (18-55) years ±7.216 SD were enrolled in the study. In this study, the AM technique was significantly more accurate (p<0.01) than the AL technique in terms of femoral tunnel angle. Furthermore, the deep to the shallow position was significantly (p= 0.018) closer to normative values, as determined by the chi-square test. The chances of error in tunnel angle in femoral condyle are 2.6 times greater in the AL technique (minimal clinical difference). Conclusion: To conclude, in ACLR the anteromedial visualisation portal can facilitate accurate femoral tunnel placement compared to the anterolateral visualisation portal.

Freeze drying is a dehydration method to dry bone under freezing environment, enabling removal of water with no or minimial effects on bone strength and durability. Larger size bones obviously require longer freeze drying time to reduce water content to the required level for long term storage at room temperature. For small size bone cubes or chips, it is a normal practice to pool cortical and cancellous bones for freeze drying. The study was aimed at determining if different type of bones of the same size influence the drying time. Human bone cubes of 10 mm x 10 mm x 10 mm were prepared from cortical bone of tibiae and cancellous bone from femoral heads. The bone cubes were freeze dried to reduce water content to less than 6%. Moisture content was monitored using gravimetric method.Weight and density of cortical bone were significantly higher than cancellous bone despite of having similar small size (p<0.05). Cortical bones (density 2.05 ± 0.35 g/cm3) with initial water content of 10.93% required 5 hours to freeze dry, while cancellous bone cubes (density 0.72 ± 0.44 g/cm3) with initial water content of 78.95% required only 1.87 hours. This study confirmed that the structure hence density of human bone cubes determine the freeze drying time. Therefore in the standard operating procedure for freeze drying of bone allograft cubes, high density cortical bone cubes and low density cancellous bone cubes must be freeze dried separately despite being of similar small size