(ANSA) - BOLOGNA, 01 OCT - He fractured his elbow when he was 7 years old and since then his arm has grown deformed, preventing him from making even the smallest daily gestures and with an important aesthetic damage for a teenager: today that child he is 16 years old and after almost ten years he returns to normal mobility thanks to a delicate intervention by the Rizzoli Orthopedic Institute of Bologna with customized tools obtained from 3D printing.
After the elbow fracture at age 7, the cartilage in the joint did not grow in an ordinary way, but with a deformity where the boy's right arm was basically rotated 60 degrees from normal.
An anomaly that prevented him, for example, from grabbing objects, fastening buttons, but which has now been corrected.
In June, the Rizzoli shoulder and elbow surgery team, directed by Roberto Rotini, performed the surgery and after three months the sixteen-year-old was able to regain the functionality of his elbow.
The operation made use of an innovative technique developed by the biomedical start-up E-lisa.
Performed scans on the elbow to be operated on and on the other, with the support of a computer model, pieces of tissue were removed from the bone calculated to arrive at the possibility of rotating the humerus by about sixty degrees, to restore normal anatomy.
"After a virtual simulation of the technique - explains Rotini - the E-lisa team has created ad hoc instruments, 3D printed, to be used in the operating room without which it would not have been possible to operate".
"This intervention - comments the director general of Rizzoli Anselmo Campagna - perfectly represents the role of our Institute: finding solutions in the most difficult cases".
(HANDLE).