Microcirugía

Reconstructive microsurgery is a surgical field where specialized operating microscopes and precision instrumentation are utilized to perform intricate operations on tiny structures.

Utilizing magnification up to fifty times that produced by the naked eye and stitches finer than a hair, surgeons are able to repair transected blood vessels and nerves less than 1mm in diameter.

The ability to reestablish continuity and blood flow to small, severed nerves and vessels has made a major impact on the potential to restore form and function to individuals impaired by trauma, cancer and congenital differences.  Advances in technology and surgical technique in the early 1960s for the first time allowed surgeons to successfully replant severed digits and limbs.

Another frequent application is the reimplantation of traumatically amputated limbs, from finger segments to arms and legs.

The use of this technique is mainly given for post-resection defects of large tumors, or when conventional reconstructive options have been exhausted in any part of the body either head and neck, breast or extremities. The most frequent uses are in the cases of reconstruction of defects of head and neck posterior to resections of tumors that in the majority of cases are deforming and with functional alterations, with limitation or inability to chew, to swallow, to vocalize and even to be able to interact with the People, due to the deformations caused by the resection.

At present, the ability to perform this type of surgery is imperative in any reconstructive surgery service in the world. This implies a high degree of specialization. The contributions of microsurgery to the quality of life of these patients are of a functional and aesthetic type, since they seek to return the form and functions of the missing tissue. The patients most frequently benefited are those who underwent oncological surgeries. In other cases, patients with sequelae to large infectious processes or severe trauma that require reconstructions of this complexity and that in other times sentenced patients to bear the complications, sequelae or even death.

Advantages of microsurgical reconstruction:

1) It allows more radical surgical resections and in advanced cases.
Provides functional improvement (attempts to restore missing tissue function) in patients.
2) Restore the shape of the defect to the previous state, with satisfactory results in trained hands
3) It minimizes the postoperative complications since the contribution of highly vascularized tissue reduces the risk of infection and surgical wound deshicencia
4) Ability to select the most suitable donor tissue to restore shape and function at the defect site.
5) It makes possible the social and labor reinsertion in an early form in the patients.