What is the best material to repair cranial defects?

The skull is one of the hard bone tissues in the human body and plays a very important role. It is the direct protective barrier for the brain, the body’s commanding officer, so if a skull defect occurs, the brain is directly exposed to danger and requires prompt skull repair surgery. Cranial defects are not uncommon, and can be caused by a variety of risk factors in life, such as traffic accidents, fights, workplace accidents, and cranio-cerebral surgeries. Moreover, there is no obvious geographical limitation of this disease, and there is a large group of patients in various places. Cranial repair is a routine procedure in neurosurgery and can be performed in large general hospitals. However, the effect of repair has a greater relationship with the skull repair material, many hospitals currently use titanium mesh material, which has some limitations and drawbacks on the effect of repair and postoperative recovery. For example, titanium mesh is not good at insulating, which will cause the patient to be sensitive to hot and cold reaction after surgery; titanium mesh is not good at histocompatibility, which may cause rejection; titanium mesh is a metal material that will also interfere with the postoperative medical examination such as CT MRI. At present, there is a kind of polyether ether ketone PEEK material can well overcome the above problems and achieve better repair effect. This PEEK material has excellent mechanical properties, may play a good protective role; good tissue compatibility, will not produce rejection. In addition, the elasticity, strength, stability, radiopacity, thermal insulation and other properties of this material are comparable to those of autologous cranial bone, which makes it an excellent cranial bone replacement material.