James Pattinson is set to undergo spinal fusion surgery in a last-ditch bid to fix a recurring stress fracture that threatens to end his Test career.
Pattinson, who will play no part in the Ashes and faces another long stint on the sidelines, is expected to be booked in for an operation soon.
Pattinson and Cricket Australia (CA) medicos are in discussions with a number of New Zealand specialists, including the guru who saved express paceman Shane Bond's career.
The procedure would involve a graft from the Victorian's hip being fused to the problematic vertebrae with screws and/or wire.
"Stabilize the area ... like having a cast on your foot," CA's sports science chief Alex Kountouris said.
"There's a few tests we have to do to see if he's a good candidate.
"There's a lot of people in Australia who do this surgery, it's reasonably common but none of them have done any fast bowlers that have come back to the elite level."
Pattinson, capable of clocking 150 km/h and terrorising the world's best batsmen in his prime, has played five Tests in the past four years.
The 27-year-old's previous four stress fractures have been in the same spot. Complicating the issue is his bowling technique but also four different stress fractures that haven't healed from his teenage years.
The serious injury is common among fast bowlers and is a major reason their workloads are managed so carefully. In the annual CA injury report released on Tuesday stress fractures ranked No.1 in terms of most games missed.
Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Pat Cummins have all been floored by stress fractures in the past but none of them went under the knife.
"It's always better to do things without surgery than with surgery because of the inherent risk of any operation," team doctor Richard Saw said.
"We have some surgical options with James because of the complexity of his case."
Meanwhile, CA believes it has found a breakthrough in the early detection of stress fractures.
"We might even see more of them being picked up but hopefully they're lasting six or eight weeks rather than 10 months," Kountouris said.
Tuesday's injury data revealed almost a quarter of domestic and international quicks were injured at any given time in the 2016-17 season.
Some 8.3 per cent of the player pool suffered a concussion last summer. The rate has virtually doubled in the past three seasons since CA introduced a concussion policy.
"We don't think there's anymore people being hit in the head ... or more people having concussions," Kountouris said, suggesting better education, reporting and more systematic testing could be factors in the rise.
"Most of them are players who miss zero or one game, so they're quite mild."
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