New Surgery Hold Promise in Controlling Prosthetic Limbs Effectively by Angela Mohan on February 16, 2021 at 3:15 PM New type of amputation surgery can help patients to better control their residual muscles and sense where their "phantom limb" is, as per MIT researchers. In most amputations, muscle pairs that control the affected joints, such as elbows or ankles, are severed. However, the MIT team has found that reconnecting these muscle pairs, allowing them to retain their normal push-pull relationship, offers people much better sensory feedback. "Both our study and previous studies show that the better patients can dynamically move their muscles, the more control they're going to have. The better a person can actuate muscles that move their phantom ankle, for example, the better they're actually able to use their prostheses," says Shriya Srinivasan, an MIT postdoc and lead author of the study.