FIGURE 1.

Key surgical steps of vSCT. First, the spinal cord injury area was removed to produce two fresh spinal cord stumps (A, B). Then, based on the effective length of the defect between two fresh spinal stumps, half of the spinal cord tissue with one side of the posterior spinal artery was cut from the distal or proximal spinal cord. The other side of the posterior spinal artery was maintained as the vascular pedicle to supply the blood flow (C). Then half of the spinal cord tissue was transplanted into the spinal cord defect area (D). PEG was topically applied to the two sites of spinal cord transection created after the transplantation to complete the SCF (E)