How long does the skull repair surgery take?

Cranial defects are a common post-injury and post-operative sequelae of craniocerebral injury patients. Since the brain tissue loses the shielding effect of normal skull, it is easy to be injured twice, and at the same time, skull defect can cause various symptoms and affect the appearance, so many of these patients need to receive skull repair and shaping, the purpose of which is to restore the normal stable state of intracranial pressure as soon as possible, and reduce the drastic changes of intracranial pressure due to skull defect, which can damage the brain function. Defects with a diameter of 3cm or more often have one or another symptoms, such as dizziness, headache, local tenderness, irritability, restlessness, etc.; patients are mostly fearful, afraid of sunlight, vibration or even loud noises, often with poor self-control, inattention, memory loss, or depression, fatigue, reticence, and low self-esteem. When standing, the skull is sunken and the external image is frightening, which will seriously affect the patient’s life and work. Only repairing the defective skull is the best solution, and the timing of repair should depend on the patient’s general and local conditions, such as after the simple depressed comminuted fracture to do the removal of collapsed bone fragments, the repair can be completed in one operation at the same time. For the skull defect caused by decompression of the skull flap of cranial injury, generally in about 3 months after surgery should be considered to repair the skull, and the earlier the repair the more beneficial to improve the patient’s symptoms, unless the open cranial injury occurs infection, repair surgery should be postponed to more than six months. How to repair the patient’s defective skull is the focus of neurosurgeons’ attention. After years of efforts, neurosurgeons developed bionic bone as artificial bone repair material and formed a personalized skull repair program, which takes only 2~4 hours for surgery. This protocol has the advantages of less bleeding, lower infection rate and higher activation rate.