Albert Aboulafia, M.D., M.B.A, orthopaedic oncologist, discusses his paper presenting a unique method of percutaneous use of an expandable reamer (X-REAM, Wright Medical) to treat a chondroblastoma. Learn more from this publication: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10499101/
Hi, my name is Albert Abolafia. My most recent publication involves treating a seven year old child who had a destructive lesion in the upper part of the thigh bone. And you can see that's the area where the ball and socket is. And so typically, in order to treat this, what's called the chondroblast, it's a benign but locally aggressive tumor, you have to dislocate the hip to expose the upper end of the thigh bone and then you would have to remove some of the cartilage and that can lead to really bad arthritis. So what we did in this case to avoid dislocating the hip and avoid injury to the growth plate, we actually made a hole down here and used a device that would go up through the neck into the head where the tumor was. And if you look at this image, this is a MRI showing where the lesion is in the ball of the ball and socket. And this is the device that we put in from the side over and in this location. And without dislocating the hip, we're able to expose or see under X ray where the tumor is and then open up this device like a little umbrella so that we could cure it or scrape out the tumor. And again, the goal of surgery is to treat the tumor to prevent it from coming bare. But to do so, while avoiding complications, such as injury to the growth plate or reducing the blood supply to the head, which would lead to arthritis. And another schematic of that is here where you see the device going in and then the device is expanded like an umbrella. So the part that goes through the bone is smaller than the expansion device and this is looking at it sideways. So seven year old treated with this condition. Now with five years of follow up is aggressively playing hockey on a competitive level. He has no hip pain and the tumor has not come back. Thank you very much.