For the clinical application of funicular suture of the served peripheral nerve, it is mandatory to differentiate motor and sensory dominant funiculi. The author investigated whether Karnovsky's stain could be simplified to make this technique applicable during surgery. This stain was shown to be definitively applicable for differentiation of the motor and sensory funiculi in histological specimens of the peripheral nerves from the human as well as from rat and dog. The author attained the same quality of stain by elevating incubation temperature to 60 degrees C and by shortening its duration to 4 hrs. Differentiation between motor and sensory funiculi was also shown to be possible even in the specimen incubated for 30 minutes, but the quality of stain was not as good as the specimen incubated for 4 hrs. Thus, simplified Karnovsky stain was thought to be clinically applicable. One problem consisted of the difficulty for the staining of the distal stump. If the nerve is left alone for more than 3 days after severance, a retrograde tracing of the funiculi from the affected organ is needed for differentiation of the funicular character.
Animals Dogs