AI-Assisted Technique Straightens Teenage Girl's Crooked Legs

New Delhi: In a remarkable medical feat, a teenage girl's crooked legs were straightened using a novel AI-assisted technique.

The young 19-year-old girl, Ayesha from Himachal Pradesh, was born with Bowlegs, also referred to as crooked legs in medical terminology.

Bowleg is a condition in which a person's legs appear bowed (bent outward) even when the ankles are together.

In Ayesha's case, both her legs and thighs were bent outward.

During her school years, this condition led her to become increasingly introverted, grappling with feelings of inferiority and struggling to engage socially due to her condition.

Doctors at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital resorted to Iliozarov fixator and six-axis correction software to correct her deformity.

"This is a Hexapod which has six legs and can move in any direction," said Dr Manish Dhawan, Senior Deformity Correction Surgeon at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, Delhi.

"These tools likely played a crucial role in correcting her leg deformities effectively and also helped her with increasing her height by 2 inches," added the doctor.

The Ilizarov technique is a surgery involving an orthopaedic external fixator applied to the limb to reconstruct, reshape or lengthen bones (usually of the limb).

A hexapod circular fixator consists of two rings that are connected by six obliquely oriented struts. These fixators are then paired with computer software which the surgeon can manipulate to control the desired correction speed and direction.

This is not a "frame" but a unique universal software-based deformity correction unit, explained the doctor.

"Deformity correction is simulated in the software by drawing the bone contour that shows the initial position of the mobile bone fragment and (calculated by the software) the expected final position," the doctor said.

After enduring a two to three-month-long surgical process which was both physically and emotionally demanding, Ayesha is now back on her feet and working at a national bank in Uttar Pradesh.