The biomechanical properties of 44 human digital collateral nerves from fresh frozen cadavers

Nerve repair and regeneration continue to be disappointing nowadays. Despite big transformations and technical progress, we still have bad clinical results from nerve repair. This study offers a materials point of view of the human digital collateral nerve biomechanical characteristics to create a technical specifications chart for nerve repair.

Forty-four human digital collateral nerves were harvested, preserved immersen in NaCl 0.9% solution until tested. They were all mounted and oriented same way and they were pulled at 6 mm/min. Density was measured with a pycnometer after the tensile test. The values of maximum stress, maximum strain, Young Modulus, density, specific stress and specific modulus were calculated.

The obtained results are presented in Table I. We did not find statistically significant differences between fingers. Density has a not statistical correlation with nerve biomechanics.

Goldberg et al. were the unique authors to make a judicious characterization of human digital collateral nerves biomechanics. They found different results perhaps a different tensile test setup. The fracture zone found in their work was inverted compared to our work. The biomechanical characteristics of peripheral nerves have a lot of dispersion as digital collateral nerves have. Density cannot homogenize the values because of its little or lack of correlation with the biomechanical properties of human digital collateral nerves.

In conclusion, this study presented a complete spectra of values to characterize human digital collateral nerves. This data could be used to understand human digital collateral nerves biomechanics create models, and optimize nerve repair.