Usefulness of a palmar crease template for the treatment of complicated syndactyly.

The treatment of complicated syndactyly has been a difficult problem because it involves not only cutaneous syndactyly but also abnormal arrangement of the finger rays. This means that this anomaly is characterized by abnormal patterns of the palmar creases. The authors prepared a template for tracing the proximal, middle, and distal palmar creases of the nonaffected hand on a clear film and used it as a mirror image to create the preoperative design, to measure the distance between the fingers, and to estimate the location and size of the skin graft intraoperatively. The authors think that the recreation of the normal palmar crease pattern in the affected hand can lead to normal arrangement of the fingers and it is very useful for the reconstruction of multiple finger webbing as part of the treatment of complicated syndactyly.