Mirror foot: treatment of three cases and review of the literature

Abstract

Purpose: To describe three cases of mirror foot and to develop a new classification of the mirror feet with an emphasis on their treatment.

Methods: Surgical treatment was performed on three patients with mirror foot. Mirror feet in the English literature were surveyed and cases found in PubMed as well as our three cases were classified according to a new classification that was an analogy of the mirror hand classification proposed by Al-Qattan et al. (J Hand Surg Br 23:534-536, 1998).

Results: All three cases obtained satisfactory outcome after the treatment. In addition to these cases, 28 mirror feet were well described in the English literature, among which only seven cases have been documented for their treatment. All of the cases could be assigned to one of the categories of the proposed classification.

Conclusion: Mirror foot is a very rare congenital deformity of the foot. We successfully treated three novel cases of mirror feet. A classification of the mirror feet proposed in this article was useful in order to understand its nature and obtain a guideline for its treatment.

Fig. 1

Case 1. a Clinical photograph of the right foot. She had eight toes on this foot. b Radiograph of the right foot. The foot had eight toes and seven metatarsals. c Clinical appearance 4 years after the operation d X-ray appearance 7 years after the operation

Fig. 2

Case 2. a Appearance of the right foot. The foot had eight toes, including a hallux. b Radiograph showing eight toes and nine metatarsals. The metatarsal of the big toe and the metatarsal medial to it were hypoplastic and overlapped each other on this X-ray. c, d Two years after the operation. The big toe is relatively short due to the hypoplastic metatarsal

Fig. 3

Case 3. a The right foot had seven toes. The third and fourth toes were crossing. b Radiograph showing seven toes and metatarsals. Hallux was located at the most tibial side. The calcaneus and the cuboid were duplicated. c Clinical appearance 9 years after the operation. d X-ray appearance 2 years after the operation

Fig. 4

Computed tomography image of the right foot of case 3, demonstrating a possible duplication on the dorso-plantar plane