Velocigraft: Economical Skin Meshing for Burn Surgery in Sub-Saharan Africa
Program:
Biomedical Engineering
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.
Team Members
-
[foreach 357]
-
[if 397 not_equal=””][/if 397][395]
[/foreach 357]
Project Mentors, Sponsors, and Partners
-
Pedro Santos, MD
-
Cameron Gibson, MD
Course Faculty
-
[foreach 429]
-
[if 433 not_equal=””][/if 433][431]
[/foreach 429]
