At the end of last year, a boy was seriously injured in a forestry accident. Part of his skull was crushed by a piece of metal. The doctors at the University Hospital of Salzburg have now provided the ten-year-old with a new skullcap using their own 3D printer.
It was December 28, 2023 when ten-year-old Felix, together with his younger brother Simon and their father and grandfather, were doing woodwork at Ulrichshögl in Ainring, Bavaria. What was initially fun ended in disaster.
A steel cable breaks, a rope clamp of four to five centimeters comes loose and is thrown against the boy’s head. The metal part penetrates the top of the skull and becomes stuck. The father first tries to stop the bleeding and calls the emergency number. He then takes the boy out of the forest on a quad bike with a trailer to a meadow, where they wait for the rescuers. Felix – still conscious – receives anesthesia from the emergency doctor and is flown by helicopter to the University Hospital of Salzburg.
The boy is taken to the shock room; a CT scan shows that the bony roof of his skull is partially crushed. During an initial four-hour operation, two pediatric surgeons and a neurosurgeon remove the metal part and many bone fragments from Felix’s brain, insert an intracranial pressure probe and temporarily close the skull. The child then goes to intensive care.
“The first period is especially difficult. The brain swells, something can become inflamed, secondary bleeding and disorders can occur,” says Roman Metzger, head of the Salzburg University Hospital for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. In the beginning, parents are not even allowed to pet their son, because any impulse to the brain must be avoided. They feared for their son Felix for a long time…
But it is clear that a large part of the skull roof is missing. But since September 2023, a groundbreaking new technology has been possible at the university hospital: spare parts can be produced with its own 3D printer. The material used is a type of plastic that is not repelled by the body.
“For Felix, we worked with the surgeons to design and print a custom implant within five days,” says head of the 3D laboratory, Werner Wurm. On January 17, the time had finally come. Felix is operated on again for almost three hours, the implant fits within half a millimeter.
Today, just five weeks after his accident, Felix is released from hospital. “In the beginning there was talk of months,” says his mother. He says his greatest wish now is to celebrate New Year’s Eve with his best friends
Source: Krone
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