Intraoperative fluorescent angiography with indocyanine green in surgery of peripheral nerve injuries

Abstract

Despite the widespread introduction of microsurgical techniques in peripheral nerve surgery, a relatively high percentage of unsatisfactory results remains. Often, when treating patients with traumatic neuropathies, the surgeon faces the problem of diastasis between the ends of the damaged nerve. As a rule, in the presence of diastasis greater than 5 cm, it is recommended to perform inter-bundle autoneuroplasty. However, overcoming diastasis less than 5 cm may be accompanied by tension of the nerve trunk, which leads to a violation of its blood supply. In this case, the outcome of the intervention may be unsatisfactory, despite the operation performed perfectly from a technical point of view. An important factor of the outcome of surgical treatment of neuropathies of various origins is the preservation of adequate blood supply to the nerve trunk in the intraoperative period. In order to assess the blood flow in the nerve trunk, the possibility of using intraoperative fluorescent angiography for reconstructive surgical interventions on nerves was considered. In patients with a complete anatomical break of the large nerve trunk, at the moment of overcoming diastasis, intraoperative angiography of the nerve trunk was performed by intravenous administration of indocyanine green, with simultaneous registration of the tension force with which the nerve trunk was affected. In addition, fluorescent angiography was performed after the restoration of the integrity of the nerve trunk, thus assessing the safety, adequacy and effectiveness of blood flow in it. It was found that intraoperative angiography is an accessible and easily implementable technique to determine the safety and, not least, the adequacy and effectiveness of the blood flow in the nerve trunk, to study the mechanisms of compensation of blood supply to the nerve after microsurgical epineural suture, and to assess the quality of matching the stumps of the nerve axis, preventing the possibility of «torsion».