Project Description:

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) accounts for 24% of the world’s 180,000 annual burn deaths despite comprising only 15% of the world’s population. Skin grafting is the gold standard for treating extensive burns, but commercial skin meshers are scarce in SSA due to high costs. Surgeons often rely on labor-intensive hand-meshing using a scalpel. The proposed solution is a low-cost, reusable template for guiding hand-meshing of autograft skin. Preliminary results on tattoo practice skin show that meshing with the template takes under a minute, compared to over 5 minutes for hand-meshing. The template can also achieve an expansion ratio of up to 1.70:1, with an average interstitial area of 1.66 cm^2. Future efforts will aim to produce a template achieving an expansion ratio of at least 2:1.

Project Photo:

On the left side is the top view of a template consisting of two plates secured together by posts, showing the incision pattern etched in the top plate. On the right side, a hand wearing a surgical glove moves a scalpel according to the pattern imprinted in the template.

Student Team Members

• Team Leader: Ojas Chahal
• Ashley Cluff
• Dalhart Dobbs
• Aarushi Pant
• Thoya Raman
• Paree Sharma
• Aditya Shrinivasan
• Christine Wang
• Joanne Wang
• Arushi Biswas

Course Faculty

• Dr. Nicholas Durr

Project Mentors, Sponsors, and Partners

• Mark Fisher, MD
• Pedro Santos, MD
• Cameron Gibson, MD
• Pallavi Ekbote