How can we better predict how much a meshed skin graft expands? What if surgeons had a practical tool to minimize the harvested skin needed for wound coverage?

Our new work in Acta Biomaterialia tackles this challenge:

To treat chronic wounds, surgeons often use split-thickness skin grafts. A thin skin layer is harvested, meshed with slits, expanded, and transplanted onto a larger wound area.

Why is predicting graft expansion important?
Accurate predictions help surgeons minimize the skin-harvested area, reducing additional trauma. Yet, the conventional model often fails to predict graft expansion accurately in real surgeries.

Surgeons widely recognize that actual skin graft expansions often fall short of predictions made by the conventional model. Despite this, they overestimate these ratios by 55%. This overestimation persists across experience levels. Survey data shows no significant difference between estimates from senior surgeons and residents. A better model is essential to improve accuracy and outcomes.

🚀 Our solution:
We developed a model that uncovers the mechanisms behind skin graft expansion. It captures two key factors involved in skin graft expansion:
1. Rotation of incision arms
2. Stretching of the skin
The model provides upper and lower limits for graft expansion.

🔎 Key predictions:
Our model predicts that surgeons stop expanding the graft when the two limits diverge. We compared these predictions with extensive experimental data from surgeries and validated their accuracy across different meshing ratios and donor skin sizes.