 Hello, my name is Dr. Surendra Kamat, I am professor and head of the department of orthopedics. Today I am going to tell you about arthroscopy of the knee joint. In other words, it's called as a keyhole surgery for the knee joint. This particular surgery is evolved over a period of time and at the moment we have state of the art facilities to do this particular surgery. Before the days of MRI, the arthroscopy was used for diagnosis as well as for treatment of knee conditions. At the moment we have good MRIs to diagnose beforehand and most of the time arthroscopy is done mostly for therapeutic or treatment purpose. Atroscopy of the knee joint is a keyhole surgery because we just put a stab incision and then pass a telescope into the knee joint to deal with various conditions of the knee joint. Most common indications for doing this particular surgery is both soft tissue as well as bony injuries. What I mean by soft tissue injury is the injuries to the ligament. For example, knee has got two ligaments on either side, two ligaments in the center of the joint and there are two wedge shaped shock absorbers called as menisci. So any damage to the menisci or to the ligaments in the center of the joint which requires a surgery for symptoms needs to be treated by arthroscopic surgery. So what we do in arthroscopic surgery is we try to either repair the torn meniscus or reconstruct a torn cruciate ligament. Let me tell you something about the torn meniscus. This is very common in young footballers or cupid players where they twist the knee joint and resulting in pain as well as difficulty in mobility. And these patients do well when we do an arthroscopic repair of the torn meniscus and post-operatively when the meniscus heals they go back to their original level of activity. You must have heard about the anti-recruciate ligament injury which is again a common injury in footballers or any cupid players because of again twisting injury. This needs to be reconstructed in symptomatic patients especially young athletic active individuals and back to their normal level of activity can be achieved by doing this simple arthroscopic procedure. And arthroscopy has really evolved as I said earlier to do lots of soft tissue as well as bony surgeries and post-operatively depending on the situation the post-operative recovery varies. For example in meniscal surgeries it may need to be for about 4 to 6 weeks of rehabilitation ACL might take about 3 months for rehabilitation. So depending on the condition for which we are doing ACL or meniscus the post-operative rehabilitation and recovery varies. It's a team approach requiring everybody's help in the hospital and when it is done properly definitely it's a boon to the human.