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Velocigraft: Economical Skin Meshing for Burn Surgery in Sub-Saharan Africa
- Program: Biomedical Engineering
- Course: EN.580.X12 BME Design Team
- Year: 2024
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.
