The goal of this procedure is to use a patient’s own cartilage cells to regrow new cartilage cells. It is a two-stage procedure, where the first stage is done arthroscopically to measure the dimensions of the cartilage injury. At this time, the surgeon also harvests the patient’s cartilage cells from an area of the knee where they are not needed, and then sends them to a lab to be grown and expanded in culture. Once they grow to a certain concentration, the cartilage cells are placed onto a membrane.

The second stage of the procedure involves replanting the membrane with the patient’s own cells back in the knee in the area of the damaged cartilage so that new cells can grow in place of the damaged ones, using the patient’s own cartilage cells as a scaffold

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