Dermatologic Surgery
Fine tuning lipoaspirate viability for fat grafting
Crawford JL, Hubbard BA, Colbert SH, Puckett CL. Plast Reconstr Surg. 2010;126:1342-1348.
Current interest in fat grafting has generated a variety of methods and tools in the quest to harvest healthy, usable adipocytes for reinjection as filler. Study authors note the effective yet complicated process of hand aspiration with low g force and a short duration of centrifusion to collect viable adipocytes in the lower sublayer of fat. In this study, they examined using the Viafill system (Lipose Corporation; Greenwich, Conn.), which includes a low g force centrifuge, filters and syringes, to make this process more efficient. Study authors harvested fat from the lower and/or upper hips of 6 female patients using the Viafill system. After 2 minutes of fat centrifugation, they examined the 3 sublayers of fat for adipocyte counts and compared them with those from standard power-assisted liposuction (PAL). The study authors found that cells were approximately 3 times more abundant in the bottom layer of fat compared with the top, and the difference between the number of viable cells collected using Viafill vs PAL was significant. Therefore, they concluded that hand aspirate indeed preserves the viability of harvested fat cells and the most abundant are found in the bottom sublayer.
Available at PubMed (PMID: 20885257) : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20885257