Accuracy of Digital Templating in Total Hip Arthroplasty

Digital radiography is becoming the standard of care for many hospitals and clinics worldwide. The intro­duction of this new standard has led to the develop­ment of arthroplasty templating software. We sought to compare our results using the standard acetate method with the new software method. Our digital pre­operative plan was accurate to within 1 size in 78% of the acetabular components and 90% of the femoral components. The manually templated plan was accu­rate to within 1 size in 67% of the acetabular compo­nents and 82% of the femoral components. There did not appear to be any correlation between body mass index and inaccuracies in the preoperative template.

Digital templating is an accurate tool to preoperatively plan total hip arthroplasty. The accuracy demonstrated in this study should be achieved easily with any digital templating software. The benefit comes from the ability to scale the templates to the actual x-ray magnification. We expect that this improved accuracy over traditional acetate templating will enhance our ability to restore normal hip biomechanics.