Abstract
Patients with full thickness circumferential burns may require an urgent and relatively high-risk procedure known as an “escharotomy” to preserve limb perfusion and sometimes airway ventilation. The burned skin is incised down to the subcutaneous level, providing decompression through the incision sites. A delay in performing an escharotomy, or an inadequately performed escharotomy, may lead to true compartment syndrome endangering life and limb. With the Army’s emerging doctrine of prolonged field care, non-expert providers must be trained to perform escharotomies when indicated. However, existing physical simulations fall short of delivering the fidelity necessary to train the procedure by not providing adequate haptic and visual cues. To improve the fidelity of escharotomy simulations, gaps in performance between synthetic tissue and full thickness burned tissue must be measured. This work evaluates the fidelity of synthetic tissues used in escharotomy simulators with that of the full thickness burned tissues characterized using an ex vivo porcine model. Incision and cutting experiments are performed at the rates relevant to the escharotomy procedure. A statistical analysis shows a significant difference in the critical force to rupture synthetic tissues and burned porcine skin tissues.
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Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of this work through the U.S. Army Futures Command, Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center STTC cooperative research agreement W911NF-17-2-0022.
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Lee, S. et al. (2021). Evaluate the Fidelity of Synthetic Tissues Used in Escharotomy Simulators. In: Notbohm, J., Karanjgaokar, N., Franck, C., DelRio, F.W. (eds) Mechanics of Biological Systems and Materials & Micro-and Nanomechanics & Research Applications. Conference Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Mechanics Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59765-8_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59765-8_14
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