Skin is the largest organ of the body. The skin could be injured or diseased due to various reasons. The skin conditions sometimes cannot be treated with medically or less invasive techniques like Laser. Removal of these scars and skin lesions perhaps would need plastic surgical treatment like Skin Grafting. The experts in skin grafting are plastic surgeons.
There are several conditions that would need skin grafting as a treatment option.
1. Burn scars – Large burn scars would bot be aesthetically pleasing. They could be hypertrophied or hypopigmented and cannot be made better with non surgical techniques.
2. Hairy Naevus – These are burth marks with hair and looks very ugly. They would need removal and skin grafting.
3. Vitiligo – The vitiligo is a dermatological condition requiring medical treatment. However, the hypopigmented patches may not disappear completely with drugrafting g treatment. If the disease condition is under control, skin grafting can be perforemd to remove the hypopigmented patches.
Skin grafting could be performed in two different techniques.
1. Single stage Skin grafting
This is the commonest technique of skin grafting. In this technique skin is harvested and apllied in the recipient site directly.
2. Two staged Skin grafting
In this procedure the reciepient bed is covered first with collagen dermal matrix or artificial dermis. it allowed to be taken and healed for two weeks. Then split thickness skin graft is harvested from the patient as in single stage skin grafting procedure and applied over the artificial dermis. This technique give a superior result as the dermal thickness is more and texture of the skin graft is better. However, the artificial dermis is fairly expensive and may not be affordable for large areas.