Matthew Carty, MD, of Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Jason Souza, MD, of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, performed a new form of arm amputation at a surgery center outside of Boston, STAT reports.
What you should know:
1. The procedure would allow patients to move their prosthetic hand more naturally. It's based on an experimental, but so far successful, leg procedure: Ewing amputation. In the procedure, surgeons recreate muscle couplings using tendons as pulleys. The system allows for the prothstetic to be controlled as if it were a natural limb.
2. The surgeons are testing the arm version of the procedure on a cadaver, to account for the elasticity of human tissue.
3. The possible new form of amputation was partially the result of funding from the Department of Defense. Amputation has remained mostly unchanged since the 1800s.
4. The duo has 10 procedures planned at Boston-based Brigham and Women's and Washington, D.C.-based Walter Reed.
Read the entire piece here.