Accurately Replicating a Face Mask

"Maybe a silicone mask approximates 75 percent accuracy. A 3-D printed mask can approximate 95 percent."
"[The finished mask is rushed to the hospital] because we want to procure the face while it is still being perfused by a beating heart."
"Their [donor relatives] primary focus was to see their son help out as many people as possible."
"We try to respect the dignity of an individual who gave up his face or her face."
Eduardo Rodriguez, director, NYU Langone face transplant program

The mask is made of hard plastic but captures the subtleties of a flesh and blood face.  3DPrint.com

And to accomplish what Dr. Rodriguez described, it was conceived that a more accurate-in-appearance and -texture mask of a deceased's face, true to the original, removed for the purpose of a face transplant operation, would allow the grieving family of the dead donor to see the body apparently undisturbed, to enable them to have a last long, lingering look at the remains of what recently was a living, loving family member. Its verisimilitude would give the mourners a feeling of closure.

To accomplish this last farewell with the respect and dignity it deserves, the brain-dead individual is wheeled into the plastic surgery department at New York University Langone Medical Center in Manhattan where a technician runs a scanner over the face which then minutely records the most minuscule detail of a face that will be repeated with the greatest degree of visual accuracy at a laboratory associated with the university, through the medium of a 3-D printer.

A 3D printer puts down thousands of layers of plastic to build the mask

This will give the green light to awaiting surgeons to detach the dying person's face and prepare to attach it to another person who has been on a wait-list for a face transplant. Printing experts attached to New York University will then aim their expertise at generating a facial replica of the scanned face of the donor, sufficiently lifelike to enable his family members to feel confident in its use in an open coffin during the subsequent funeral.

At the present time, silicone masks cast from moulds with painted features have been available; not as lifelike nor as faithful to the original. Dr. Rodriguez in 2015 performed an extensive transplant for a former firefighter from Mississippi whose face, exposed directly to fire through his line of duty, melted away. Consequently he has lived in a waiting game, his name on a list for over a year, for the opportunity to regain a new face, through the generosity of a donor.

A 26-year-old Brooklyn bicycle mechanic by the name of David Rodebaugh, victim of a cycling accident, remained comatose when his family met with Dr. Rodriguez asking how their dying family member's body would appear, understanding when he responded that the silicone mask had its limitations. Nonetheless they agreed to proceed with the face removal. That anxiety led to Dr. Rodriguez's search for a more accurate face mask to preserve the dignity of the dead donor.

On the donor's death, the mask is placed atop his stripped face; covering the seam where mask meets hairline it is difficult to discern that it is a mask and not the individual's original face. When the face printing is set to proceed, a hand-held device scans the donor's face pre-detachment, with five camera lenses, capturing details from multiple angles, then projects a grid onto the face to produce a three-dimensional 'map'. Hours are then spent arranging files on computers to send them to a printer full of acrylic-based photopolymer cartridges.

At this point layers so compressed that 600 of them makes up a centimeter are laid down by the printer. It takes over 24 hours for the printer to complete a face mask that might require ten thousand infinitesimally thin layers. On completion, technicians rush the mask to the hospital where the donor's face will have been removed while he is on life support. With this more accurate reproduction of an individual's face, the hope is that more families will be encouraged to agree to permitting a loved one's face to be used for transplant purposes.

Leslie Bernstein, an NYU Langone administrator, had her face scanned to make a demonstration mask

Suspending Credulity

"The first human transplant on human cadavers has been done. A full head swap between brain-dead organ donors is the next stage."
"We have entered an age where we will take our destiny back in our hands. Today, we stand on the brink of a revolution, not only in medicine but in human life as well."
Sergio Canavero, Italian surgeon

Jeff J.Mitchell/Getty Images    Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero

This is a man who appears to misspeak, for there was never a time when any living thing,designed by nature, was the master of its own destiny; that being the case, how can humankind 'take our destiny back in our hands'? as he exults in announcing that a surgical team he has coached in China has managed to transfer a head from one cadaver to the body of another cadaver? Of a certainty, the man is fixated on his theory that a severed spine can be repaired, that human consciousness can be transferred from one source to another.

Dr. Canavero along with a Chinese colleague, Dr. Xiaoping Ren, published in the journal CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics an account of an experiment that transplanted the heads of laboratory rats on the back of the necks of larger recipient rats, fourteen of which survived for a day and a half, back in April. They described a special pump and tubes used in the rat surgeries ensuring adequate blood supply to the donor's brain until the head was connected to the recipient.

Xiaoping Ren and Sergio Canavero, the surgeons behind the plans for the world's first human head transplant.   Newsweek

"The whole operation process preserves the carotid arteries, jugular veins and vertebral arteries", they wrote. The Italian surgeon created HEAVEN: the 'head anastomosis venture' project. Obviously if his theory could rival nature's creative process, why not coopt heaven too? Two surgical teams working together cut away two men's heads one of whom is the 'recipient', the other, an accident victim for example whose brain is dead but whose body is otherwise healthy is considered the 'donor'.

The recipient's head is placed on the donor body with the use of a specialized swivel crane after which it is reconnected and the trachea, esophagus, carotid arteries and jugular veins are stitched together and the wait ensues for the recipient to awaken and above all, move; a healthy brain/head whose ailing body has been replaced with a healthy one to produce an altogether functional and healthy whole.

This procedure, using two cadavers as a premiere to a progression toward restoring complete body health to an individual whose body has failed and whose brain is fully functioning, fusing his head to a healthy body whose brain is declared dead, took 18 hours to complete. It took place , according to the two surgeons, at Harbin Medical University, China. Its success giving Dr. Canavero the material for a book, Medicus Magnus; the Revolution Medicine and How We Utilize It.

Others in the medical community are yet to be persuaded, while bio-ethicists declare the surgeon to be reckless in his ambition. No one has yet been able to repair a spinal cord completely disconnected, according to other transplant surgeons. And there's the niggling little suspicion that once the transplanted head has been firmly established on someone else's body, should the procedure succeed, what guarantees are there that the original mind will dominate?

A similar operation on a live human will take place 'imminently', the controversial professor claims. Professor Canavero (right) made the announcement at a press conference in Vienna this morning (live stream pictured)

Transplants in the Realm of Fiction

"[One] problematic [issue with brain transplants, however, would be that] no aspect of your original external body remains the same."
"Your head is no longer there, your brain is transplanted into an entirely different skull."
"At the moment, I can only disclose that there has been massive progress in medical experiments that would have seemed impossible even as recently as a few months ago. The milestones that have been reached will undoubtedly revolutionize medicine.
"[Experiments on a number of different animals in South Korea and China have been conducted] and the results are unambiguous: the spinal cord -- and with it the ability to move -- can be entirely restored."
"In a few months we will sever a body from a head in an unprecedented medical procedure. If we bring this person back to life, we will receive the first real account of what actually happens after death, whether there is an afterlife, a heaven, a hereafter or whatever you may want to call it or whether death is simply a flicking off of the light switch and that's it"
Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero

Xiaoping Ren and Sergio Canavero, the surgeons behind the plans for the world's first human head transplant. OOOM-Sergio Canavero

"[Canavero's latest theory of merging head transplants with] resurrecting [the frozen dead is absurd]. People have their own doubts about whether anything can be salvaged from these frozen heads or bodies because of the damage freezing does."
"Then saying that he has some technique for making this happen, that has never been demonstrated in frozen animals, is absurd."
"[Canavero plays on people's fantasies] that somehow you can come back from death, fantasies that you can live forever if you just keep moving your head around. [He manipulates and contorts science] That's why I pay attention to him."
Bioethicist Arthur Caplan, head of ethics, NYU Langone Medical Centre, New York City

"Unless it is technically possible, and it is not, to replace all the water left in a body's cells with glycol, unfreezing a frozen corpse will rupture the cell walls ensuring that you are mush -- a corpsesicle."
Dr. Eike-Henner Kluge, bioethicist, University of Victoria

No matter; Dr. Canavero -- vulgar showman he may be -- is adamant that his surgical methodology imagined not yet put into action, will serve to demonstrate to the doubting world of science, that a human body can be frozen and then regenerated; it works with frogs after all, why not humans? Perhaps because we are not frogs and nature's design to preserve frogs did not extend to humans....? In ten months' time (while awaiting a donor body), he is fully prepared to transplant a head.

But he is also looking forard to reawakening a cryogenically frozen brain, to transplant it as well into a waiting skull, not its original home.

Dr. Canavero explained his plans in depth in an interview with German-language OOOM magazine recently, that he plans to bring back to life brains frozen in liquid nitrogen at a cryogenics bank, within the next three years. As he sees the situation, a brain transplant would not be as problematical as a full-head transplant, though that is precisely what he plans to undertake in under a year's time.

In transplanting a brain, rejection issues are sidelined since no longer would there be a requirement to reconnect and stitch up severed vessels, nerves, tendons and muscles as occurs when a head is fused to a brain-dead donor body.

This man with his hugely improbable plans to shake up the world of science and transplantation first sketched out his plans to mount a human head transplant in the journal Surgical Neurology International, two years earlier. Fusing the donor and recipient's severed spinal cords, a medical-scientific feat never even before imagined, to restore function while avoiding massive, irreversible brain damage, or death, is the issue that Dr. Canavero identifies as the most critical technical hurdle in achieving successfully in a head transplant.

He explained in an earlier interview that his unique, self-designed protocol relies on a special gluelike substance he calls "fusogen", which was developed by a chemist. It is that "fusogen" that he will rely upon to reconnect the severed spinal cord stumps and persuade axons and neurons to regrow across the surgical gap. He plans his first head transplant surgery to take place in Harbin, China, with the surgical team to be led by Xiaopig Ren, a Chinese orthopedic surgeon whose credits include participation in the first hand transplant undertaken in 1999 in the United States.

Dr. Ren has been practising this type of surgery, performing hundreds of head transplants in rodents, preparing himself for the surgery with human patients. According to Dr. Canavero's vision on how to proceed in  grafting a head on a donor body, the process is to cut off two heads; one the recipient, the other the donor. The donor's brain would be dead, but his body in healthy condition perhaps as a result of some catastrophic accident.

The recipient's head would be transferred to the donor body with the use of a specially designed swivel crane. The procedure must take place in less than an hour to minimize complications.



Skeptics abound. Most scientists scoff at the very idea that such a surgery could be attempted with the expectation of success. As for freezing a human body or body parts, let alone a brain and then anticipating its resurrection, it is the stuff of science fiction, an illusion. And then those who prefer to wait and watch, point out that two years ago 21st Century Medicine researchers (a California cryobiology research company) reported having succeeded in freezing the brain of a rabbit with the use of a flash-freezing technique meant to protect and stabilize tissue.

"This procedure will not work. If it was a good procedure, show me a dog that has undergone it, walking across the stage with a transplanted body."
"Try it with monkeys first. But he can't: the result would be, at best, a shambling horror, an animal driven mad with pain and terror, crippled and whimpering, and a poor advertisement for his experiment. And most likely what he'd have is a collection of corpses that suffered briefly before expiring." 
Biologist Paul Zachary Myers, associate professor, University of Minnesota

"Experts have pointed out multiple problems in every step of the proposed surgery. For example, gluing two ends of severed spinal cords will not make nerve fibers fuse well into each other, as nerve cells immediately form scar tissue. Even if the glue worked, connecting millions of nerves together is not possible. Other big-picture issues include getting the immune system to accept the new head, and keeping the head alive. Scientists are still figuring out how low they can bring the temperature before brain tissue starts to act up."
Brain Decoder