Three years back in a motorcycle accident, Claudia Mitchell, 27, had lost her left arm and now she can feel the sensations with her artificial arm! After a pioneer operation, her artificial arm was given the sense of touch by rerouting some of her nerves. She can now feel the touch of anything with her artificial hand with the help of a device attached to her chest.
The operation took four hour to complete in which, the nerves of her shoulder that used to carry signals from the hand to the brain were moved and redirected to some muscles of her chest. It was after four months that the feeling of touch, temperature and pain was felt by Mitchell’s artificial arm.
Jesse Sullivan, 54-year-old, had lost both his hands when he had touched an electrified wire and now he is able to feel the sensation in one of his hands after the operation. A team of doctors treated the patients in Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. The operations were carried out earlier this year in which, doctors took the nerves that used to control the movements of the hand and arm, and grafted them to the muscles of chest. The sensors in the prosthetic limb pick up the muscle movement caused when the patient thought about moving his hand.
A sensory neurophysiologist at the clinic, Paul Marasco said that a procedure called targeted reinnervation is used in recent operations, which helps patient to control their artificial limbs more naturally. The most noticeable thing is that the nerves that were unused for more than one year carry the sensations when they were grafted to other tissues. With these results the excited team of doctors have tried this operation on two more patients. Marasco has the opinion that prosthetic limbs with the sense of touch will be available in two to four years.
Via: Guardian
