What materials are used to repair the skull

One of the most important aspects of skull repair surgery is the selection of the material to be used for the repair of the skull. Since the repair material often accompanies the patient’s life for many years afterwards, the material selection requires first of all high biocompatibility, and needs to ensure certain strength and stiffness at the same time to provide strong enough protection, but also to meet the intraoperative shaping needs to achieve a satisfactory effect of cosmetic shape repair. Nowadays, after decades of development, our cranial bone repair surgery is also gradually updated, as early as 20 years ago, when we first started working with plexiglass or even cementless. After the continuous evolution of materials, in the last 20 years, titanium mesh has become a major restorative material. As you can see, this is the titanium material that we use, whether we call it titanium plate or titanium mesh, it’s the type of thing that covers the area of the skull defect. Another material that we have developed in recent years is PEEK, which is a material called polyether ether ketone, which is a material that we have used in recent years for cranial repair, and it can replace titanium mesh. We can see that titanium mesh is relatively soft, you can take a look at this, although it is a metal material, but made very thin, so that when we press, it has a certain deformation. These are the two materials that are currently used. Both of these materials are compatible with the human body and have very good histocompatibility. They have become the new trend in cranial repair materials.