Surgeons Reconstruct Long Island Baby’s Skull With 3D Printing Technology
By FOX, March 15, 2014
This post has been viewed 3,040 times.
When baby Gabriel was born in August, his dad, Manuel Dela Cruz, said everything initially seemed fine with his new son. It wasn’t until a week after his birth that Gabriel’s parents thought their son’s forehead looked abnormal.
“We noticed something was wrong with him,” Dela Cruz, of East Quogue, N.Y., said “His eye wasn’t the same, and his right forehead was more protruded than the other one.”
Worried for their son’s health, the new parents took Gabriel to a pediatrician, who diagnosed the newborn with unilateral coronal synostosis – also known as anterior plagiocephaly. For babies with this condition, a growth plate fuses prematurely on one side of the skull, causing the forehead to become more and more distorted and form asymmetrically.
Although the side effects of plagiocephaly are mostly cosmetic, the deformity can grow significantly worse if left untreated – leading many parents to opt for reconstructive surgery. Knowing what needed to be done, Dela Cruz said it was frightening to have their son undergo an operation at such a young age.
