How to choose materials for cranial repairs

How should I choose the material for cranial bone repair? In recent years, the number of patients with cranial defects has gradually increased, due to various reasons for cranial defects, such as, falling objects, traffic accidents, craniocerebral diseases and so on. Therefore, after the defect, it is necessary to carry out cranial bone repair, so which cranial bone repair material is better? At present, the common treatments for cranial injuries are autologous bone and allogeneic bone graft. However, autologous bone grafts often face the challenges of shape matching and limited sources, and allogeneic bone grafts are prone to immune rejection. Because of cranial bone repair surgery, many cranial bone repair materials have also “emerged”, and currently the widely used materials are titanium mesh and PEEK. Although titanium mesh has advantages, there are still many disadvantages. Titanium mesh manufacturers are relatively chaotic, and because of the high technical requirements of titanium alloy processing, so the quality of molding varies, especially for osteoporosis patients, often occurring poor fit. Secondly, titanium mesh is greatly affected by temperature. Moreover, due to the inherent lack of plasticity of titanium mesh, it is difficult to shape titanium mesh perfectly for large curved parts of the head, such as the forehead and the arch of the eyebrow, and there may be traces of mesh after implantation, resulting in a poor visual effect. Compared to titanium mesh, PEEK material is much better. PEEK (polyether ether ketone) is a kind of special engineering plastics, which looks almost the same as ordinary plastics, but it has many advantages such as high temperature resistance, corrosion resistance, robustness, good toughness and fatigue resistance at the same time. It is strong but flexible, the weight and texture is very close to the human skeleton, even if the collision will not appear dent or deformation, PEEK cranial repair perfectly compensate for the shortcomings of the titanium mesh. Warm reminder: PEEK material is far better than titanium mesh because of repair, so PEEK is still a more appropriate choice, and we recommend that patients and friends early treatment.