Craniofacial malformation caused by premature fusion of cranial suture of infants has a serious impact on their growth. The purpose of skull remodeling surgery for infants with craniosynostosis is to expand the skull and allow the brain to grow properly. There are no standardized treatments for skull remodeling surgery at the present, and the postoperative effect can be hardly assessed reasonably. Children with sagittal craniosynostosis were selected as the research objects. By analyzing the morphological characteristics of the patients, the point cloud registration of the skull distortion region with the ideal skull model was performed, and a plan of skull cutting and remodeling surgery was generated. A finite element model of the infant skull was used to predict the growth trend after remodeling surgery. Finally, an experimental study of surgery simulation was carried out with a child with a typical sagittal craniosynostosis. The evaluation results showed that the repositioning and stitching of bone plates effectively improved the morphology of the abnormal parts of the skull and had a normal growth trend. The child’s preoperative cephalic index was 65.31%, and became 71.50% after 9 months’ growth simulation. The simulation of the skull remodeling provides a reference for surgical plan design. The skull remodeling approach significantly improves postoperative effect, and it could be extended to the generation of cutting and remodeling plans and postoperative evaluations for treatment on other types of craniosynostosis.
It is very difficult to repair large articular cartilage defect of the hip. From May 1990 to April 1994, 47 hips in 42 patients of large articuler cartilage defects were repaired by allograft of skull periosteum. Among them, 14 cases, whose femoral heads were grade. IV necrosis, were given deep iliac circumflex artery pedicled iliac bone graft simultaneously. The skull periosteum had been treated by low tempreturel (-40 degrees C) before and kept in Nitrogen (-196 degrees C) till use. During the operation, the skull periosteum was sutured tightly to the femoral head and sticked to the accetabulum by medical ZT glue. Thirty eight hips in 34 patients were followed up for 2-6 years with an average of 3.4 years. According to the hip postoperative criteria of Wu Zhi-kang, 25 cases were excellent, 5 cases very good, 3 cases good and 1 case fair. The mean score increased from 6.4 before operation to 15.8 after operation. The results showed, in compare with autograft of periosteum for biological resurface of large articular defect, this method is free of donor-site morbidity. Skull periosteum allograft was effective for the treatment of large articular cartilage defects in hip.
Cranial defects may result from clinical brain tumor surgery or accidental trauma. The defect skulls require hand-designed skull implants to repair. The edge of the skull implant needs to be accurately matched to the boundary of the skull wound with various defects. For the manual design of cranial implants, it is time-consuming and technically demanding, and the accuracy is low. Therefore, an informer residual attention U-Net (IRA-Unet) for the automatic design of three-dimensional (3D) skull implants was proposed in this paper. Informer was applied from the field of natural language processing to the field of computer vision for attention extraction. Informer attention can extract attention and make the model focus more on the location of the skull defect. Informer attention can also reduce the computation and parameter count from N2 to log(N). Furthermore,the informer residual attention is constructed. The informer attention and the residual are combined and placed in the position of the model close to the output layer. Thus, the model can select and synthesize the global receptive field and local information to improve the model accuracy and speed up the model convergence. In this paper, the open data set of the AutoImplant 2020 was used for training and testing, and the effects of direct and indirect acquisition of skull implants on the results were compared and analyzed in the experimental part. The experimental results show that the performance of the model is robust on the test set of 110 cases fromAutoImplant 2020. The Dice coefficient and Hausdorff distance are 0.940 4 and 3.686 6, respectively. The proposed model reduces the resources required to run the model while maintaining the accuracy of the cranial implant shape, and effectively assists the surgeon in automating the design of efficient cranial repair, thereby improving the quality of the patient’s postoperative recovery.
In order to investigate the possibility of porous hydroxyapatite ceramics (HAC) in the repair of skull bone defect, twenty-four rabbits were used. The bone defect model was created by operation to obtain a defect in parietal bone in a size of 1 cm x 1 cm. Filled the defect with HAC and methyl-methacrylate-syrene copolymer (MMAS) to fill the defect as control. At 1st, 2nd and 3rd months after operation, behavior of the rabbits was observed and then these animals were sacrificed and specimens were examined under microscope. Results showed as follows: after operation, behavior of all animals were normal. By histological examination, it was found that in HAC group, there were granulation tissue, fibrous tissue and newly formed vessels grew into the pores and the osteoblasts formed osseous trabeculae. There was no inflammatory cell infiltration. In the MMAS grafted asea, there was formation of fibrous membrane. It suggested that HAC might be a good material for bone substitute in repair of skull bone defect.
Objective To investigate the effectiveness and adverse effect of the absorbable fixation system on cranial bone flap reposition and fixation after craniotomy. Methods Between July 2010 and December 2011, 67 cases underwent cranial bone flap reposition and fixation with absorbable fixation system after craniotomy and resection of intracranial lesions. There were 38 males and 29 females with a median age of 32 years (range, 5 months to 73 years). The disease duration ranged from 3 months to 6 years (median, 25 months). Forty-one lesions were located at supratentorial and 26 at subtentorial, including at the frontotemporal site in 13 cases, at the frontoparietal site in 12 cases, at the temporal oprietal site in 8 cases, at the temporooccipital site in 5 cases, at the occipitoparietal site in 4 cases, and at the posterior cranial fossa in 25 cases. The diagnosis results were glioma in 15 cases, cerebral vascular diseases (aneurysm, arteriovenous malformation, and cavemous angioma) in 8 cases, meningioma in 7 cases, arachnoid cyst in 7 cases, acoustic neurinoma in 5 cases, cholesteatoma in 3 cases, primary trigeminal neuralgia in 5 cases, cerebral abscess in 3 cases, hypophysoma in 2 cases, craniopharyngioma in 2 cases, metastatic tumor in 2 cases, radiation encephalopathy in 2 cases, medulloblastoma in 1 case, ependymocytoma in 1 case, germinoma in 1 case, atypical teratoma/rhabdoid tumor in 1 case, facial spasm in 1 case, and subdural hematoma in 1 case. Intracranial lesion size ranged from 3 cm × 2 cm to 7 cm × 5 cm. The changes of local incision and general condition were observed. Results Subcutaneous effusion occurred in 2 supratentorial lesions and 3 subtentorial lesions, which was cured at 2 weeks after puncture and aspiration. All incisions healed primarily and no redness or swelling occurred. CT scans showed good reposition of the cranial bone flap and smooth inner and outer surfaces of the skull at 2 weeks after operation. All 67 patients were followed up 3-20 months (mean, 10.3 months). During follow-up, the skull had satisfactory appearance without discomfort, local depression, or effusion. Moreover, regular CT and MRI scans showed no subside, or displacement of the cranial bone flap or artifacts. Conclusion Absorbable fixation system for reposition and fixation of the cranial bone flap not only is simple, safe, and reliable, but also can eliminate the postoperative CT or MRI artifact caused by metals fixation system.
ObjectiveTo investigate the feasibil ity and effectiveness of the modified traction arch of skull (crossbar traction arch) for skull traction in treating cervical spine injury by comparing with traditional traction arch of skull. MethodsBetween June 2009 and June 2013, 90 patients with cervical vertebrae fractures or dislocation were treated with modified skull traction surgery (trial group, n=45) and traditional skull traction surgery (control group, n=45). There was no significant difference in gender, age, injury types, injury level, the interval between injury and admission, and Frankel grading of spinal injury between 2 groups (P>0.05). The cl inical efficacy was evaluated after operation by the indexes such as traction arch sl i ppage times, operation time, the infection incidence of the pin hole, incidence of skull perforation, visual analogue scale (VAS), and reduction status of cervical dislocation. ResultsThe traction arch slippage times, the infection incidence of the pin hole, operation time, blood loss, and postoperative VAS score in trial group were significantly lower than those in control group (P<0.05). There was no significant difference in the incidence of skull perforation caused by clamp crooks of traction arch between 2 groups (P=1.000). At 2 weeks after operation, the patients had no headaches, infections, or other complications in 2 groups. In patients with cervical dislocation, 4 of the trial group and 6 of the control group failed to be reset, the reduction rate was 83.33% (20/24) and 68.42% (13/19) respectively, showing no significant difference (χ2=0.618, P=0.432). ConclusionThe operation with modified traction arch of skull has significant advantages to reduce postoperative complication compared with tradition traction arch of skull.