Full-Thickness Skin Grafting

Among the various techniques of skin grafting, full-thickness skin graft (FTSG) represents the primary graft technique that plays a crucial role in esthetic enhancements and functional recovery of patients. However, FTSG has the following disadvantages: a lower graft take rate than that noted in the case of split-thickness skin grafting (STSG), longer surgery operation time, and limited selection of donor site and graft size. This chapter will describe on how to overcome these disadvantages and concomitantly resolve patients' functional and aesthetic problems and new advanced techniques should be remained, particularly for reconstruction of the head and neck as well as the upper and lower extremities.  The optimal way of achieving surgical success and avoiding supplemental surgeries is by combining several techniques to obtain a perfect skin graft take rate without losing any of the grafted skin. Therefore, in this chapter, a new surgical technique has been introduced that ensures generally not performed in clinital settings. And will also discuss the concept of FTSG with dermo fat composite graft which author has recently reported on the journal. Furthermore, the long-term follow up results are over 10 or 20 years after pediatric FTSG, which is rarely encountered in the clinical situation.