Maxillofacial surgery surgical guide

A virtual surgery plan is only valuable when you can translate it to the OR. An effective way to do so is by using surgical guides. A surgical guide is a small customized tool made from a sterilisable material that can be used for short-term in a patient and that guides your saw and/or drill in the planned direction. On request we can assist you with a full pre-operative surgical planning, including the cutting planes and drill holes and their respective angles. To transfer this plan to the actual procedure, we design surgical (cutting) guides. The surgical guide fits exactly on a predetermined part of the patient’s bone, making sure you cut and drill at the right place, under the right angle (and to the right depth). Guides can be used in any kind of surgery (osteotomies), but are often used for mandible reconstruction with an autologous bone graft (fibula or iliac crest) or for meningioma resection. To illustrate we present here a mandible resection and reconstruction case using an iliac crest graft and below a similar mandible reconstruction with a fibula graft. Case 1: Mandible resection and reconstruction with iliac crest Surgical planning Segmental resection of the mandible followed by (free flap) mandible reconstruction with autologous bone is a delicate procedure that can benefit from careful 3D surgical planning. From a CT-scan, accurate 3D bone models can be generated, which can be used in surgical planning software. You don’t need to invest money to buy, or time to learn this software, but our biomedical engineers can do this with you. Together we define the cutting planes and make a virtual resection of the mandible.