ABSTRACT
Activity-related injuries rarely involve damage to an isolated ligament but often result in a number of ligaments being injured with an assortment of insults occurring in other articular tissues. Hence, when investigating ligament repair, it is prudent to use animal models so that the type and degree of ligament injury can be controlled and the confounding influence of extraneous healing responses can be excluded. Some of the earliest work on ligament healing was performed on dogs and this species remains one of the most popular animal models to date. Many investigators are using sheep and goats to assess cruciate ligament reconstructions and ligament prostheses. When studying ligament repair in vivo, the tissue must be subjected to a certain degree of trauma before it can heal. Synthetic ligaments are used to investigate the effect of supplementary support during cruciate ligament repair. Several methods of measuring ligament blood flow have been developed including hydrogen clearance, microsphere distribution and laser Doppler perfusion imaging.
