Pre-op instrument · hip

Most hips that dislocate were aimed inside the safe zone.

Fifty-eight percent of dislocated hips had the cup within Lewinnek. The safe zone was never the problem. The problem is that a cup is aimed once, in one position, and the patient then stands up and sits down. If the pelvis moves the way it should, almost any reasonable cup works. If it does not, the window you have to hit is a few degrees wide, and nothing on a supine film tells you that.

Measure this hip → The knee instrument →
Two lateral films and a lordosis angle · gives the hip-spine group, the functional cup target, and how wide the window actually is
The envelope · standing and seated lateral films

The hip's envelope is posture, not flexion.

Pelvic incidence is fixed morphology and never changes. Sacral slope changes when the patient sits. The difference between those two sacral slopes is the whole story, and it takes two films to see it.

Fixed morphology

Pelvic incidence and lumbar lordosis. PI does not change with posture or surgery.
55°
PI = pelvic tilt + sacral slope. The patient's own constant.
52°
PI minus LL over 10° is a flatback.

The two postures

Sacral slope standing, then seated. Their difference is spinopelvic mobility.
42°
Upright, weight-bearing lateral.
18°
Flexed-seated lateral. This is the film that is usually missing.
Spinopelvic mobility
24°
change in sacral slope, standing to seated
Group 1A

The ordinary hip.

How wide your cup window is
14.5° wide
anatomic cup anteversion30°

Log this hip to the ledger →What the group means →
The four groups · Vigdorchik hip-spine classification

Two questions: is the spine aligned, and does the pelvis move?

Flatback is pelvic incidence minus lumbar lordosis over 10 degrees. Stiff is under 10 degrees of sacral-slope change from standing to seated. Those two yes-or-no answers give you the group, and the group gives you the construct.

Why the safe zone failed

A cup is aimed once. A patient changes position all day.

Every degree the pelvis tilts backwards adds about seven tenths of a degree of functional cup anteversion. A mobile pelvis supplies roughly twenty degrees of that automatically the moment the patient sits. A stiff one supplies almost none, and the cup has to have been built that way from the start.

What the model shows when you run the four groups
Deformity alone does not narrow the target. Immobility does. Run 1A and 2A through the tool and the window is the same width, 14.5 degrees, even though one spine is flat and the other is not: a pelvis that still rotates carries its shifted frame into both postures. Run 1B and 2B and the window collapses to 4 degrees and 2.5 degrees. The film worth chasing is the seated one.
Where that reading is too clean. The literature ranks 2A above 1A in risk, and this model does not, because a linear tilt-to-anteversion relationship cannot see two things that matter: flatback patients often progress to stiffness over the life of the implant, and global sagittal balance affects more than cup orientation. Read the equal windows as "stiffness dominates the geometry," not as "flatback is safe."
What is certain and what is not. The directions are certain: posterior pelvic tilt increases functional anteversion, a stiff pelvis withholds it, and a narrow window is less forgiving. The exact target windows in this tool are a tuning surface, not a validated standard. The tilt-to-anteversion relationship is treated as linear. The Combined Sagittal Index is deliberately not computed here because its thresholds are stated inconsistently across secondary sources; take those from the primary paper. Not a cleared device, not clinical advice.
The same loop as the knee

Predict it, then find out how right you were.

The knee instrument predicts a laxity envelope and gets scored against the measured knee. This does the same with posture: the predicted functional target against the cup you actually delivered and where the hip actually sat afterwards. One programme, two joints, one calibration record that belongs to the surgeon.

Log this hip

Put the first row in.

The measurements above are attached to this entry. Contact details only; we reply with the ledger format and the knee instrument.

Stored as telemetry for calibration, not as a clinical record. No patient identifiers are collected.