The Road to Optimized Nerve Reconstruction

Traumatic injuries to the peripheral nerves cause considerable disability and economic burden. It is estimated that 5% of patients admitted to Level I trauma centers have peripheral nerve injury. The reconstruction of peripheral nerve defects remains a clinical challenge. The gold standard for nerve injuries that cannot be directly reconstructed is the use of a bridging autologous nerve graft. The use of autograft nerve is limited by supply, diameter, and length, and has associated donor site morbidity. This has constrained the ability to optimally reconstruct injured nerves of patients with multiple segmental defects and resulted in the prioritization of which nerves to reconstruct. This thesis focuses on reconstruction of peripheral nerve defects and highlights the clinical problem and focuses on the optimization of a decellularized nerve allografts.