A study of the correlation between different methods of functional evaluation of the sciatic nerve of rats after a crushing injury was carried out. Twenty five Wistar rats weighing 250 g in average were submitted to a controlled crushing injury of the nerve and evaluated by two conventional methods for obtaining the sciatic functional index (SFI), based on manual and computer-based measurement of parameters on animals' footprints, and by a new method developed by the authors, based on walking track movie recording and the measurement of the same parameters, on the 1st, 7th, 14th and 21st postoperative days, a comparison being established with the values obtained preoperatively and between the different methods in all periods. The results showed that the method of recording the walking track allows for a better visualization of the injured paw and that this method positively correlates with the conventional methods, as early as the first postoperative week on, provided that the same SFI formula is used.
Evaluation; Sciatic nerve; Regeneration
