Tissue Expansion

Tissue Expansion At A Glance

Tissue expansion is a technique used by plastic surgeons to cause the body to grow additional skin, bone or other tissues.

Keeping living tissues under tension causes new cells to form and the amount of tissue to increase. In some cases, this may be accomplished by the implantation of inflatable balloons under the skin. By far the most common method, the surgeon inserts the balloon expander beneath the skin and periodically, over weeks or months, injects a saline solution to slowly expand the overlaying skin. The growth of tissue is permanent.. Breast reconstruction surgery, for example, can use this technique when the mammary gland was removed by surgery (radical mastectomy). Later a more permanent artificial implant (silicone breast implant is inserted under the expanded pouch of skin.

In other applications, excess skin is grown purposefully by expansion on the back or the buttocks, so that it can be harvested later for transplantation to another site where skin was lost due to trauma, extensive wounds, surgery, burns, etc. A device called a dermatome is used to slice thin strips of skin from the expanded area, which later is closed by suturing it.

Tissue expansion has also been used for the technique of foreskin restoration, which is usually non-surgical and applies tension externally using specialized devices to replace circumcised tissues with new cells.

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