It has recently come to light that a new type of amputation surgery has been invented by researchers to help amputees better control their residual muscles and sense where their "phantom limb" is in space. This, in turn, would help with better control of prosthetic limbs, and reduction of limb pain, reports Science Daily.
"Both our study and previous studies show that better patients can dynamically move their muscles, the more control they're going to have. The better a person can actuate muscles that move their phantom ankle, for example, the better they're actually able to use their prostheses," said Shriya Srinivasan, an MIT postdoc and lead author of the study.
As part of the study, 15 patients got this new type of surgery, known as the agonist-antagonist myoneural interface (AMI). It turns out that with AMI, patients were able to control their muscles more precisely as compared to patients with traditional amputations. The AMI patients also reported that there was more freedom of movement and less pain in their affected limb.
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"Through surgical and regenerative techniques that restore natural agonist-antagonist muscle movements, our study shows that persons with an AMI amputation experience a greater phantom joint range of motion, a reduced level of pain, and an increased fidelity of prosthetic limb controllability," says Hugh Herr, a professor of media arts and sciences, head of the Biomechatronics Group in the Media Lab, and the senior author of the paper.
The report further states that ever since these preclinical studies, about 25 people have undergone the AMI surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital. The research was funded by the MIT Media Lab Consortia, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research, and the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs of the U.S. Department of Defense.
"We're learning that this technique of rewiring the limb and using spare parts to reconstruct that limb, is working, and it's applicable to various parts of the body," Herr says.
