The TLEMsafe project, “Twente Lower Extremity Model for safe and predictable musculoskeletal surgery”, aims to develop a patient-specific surgical navigation system. The system allows the surgeon to pre-plan and simulate the outcome of an extensive orthopaedic intervention. In addition, the navigation part of the system can be used to help the surgeon during complex musculoskeletal operations.

The TLEMsafe Project is a collaboration between Radboud university medical center, University of Twente, Technical University of Warsaw, Brainlab, Materialise and AnyBody Technology. The project is financially supported by funding from the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Union.

Decision aids are commonly used to inform patients and to support the patient and physician to think about the level of experienced pain and discomfort, the personal circumstances and the intended type of surgery. These factors and the complication risk can influence which treatment fits best in the patients individual situation.
Until now, decision aids provide general information about treatment options and complication risk. Since one of the main challenges for physicians is to inform the individual patient by providing personal information about the complication risk, we aim to update the decision aid with a pre-operative risk estimation tool which takes the comorbid diseases and medication use of the individual patient into account.  

The aim of this project is to develop and implement a decision aid for patients with hip- or knee osteoarthritis to facilitate shared decision making by providing predicted outcomes which are highly patient specific.