Sculpting with fat can restore faces
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Jeremy Feldbusch lost his sight after a piece of artillery shrapnel tore through his skull in Iraq in 2003. He underwent a new procedure that transferred fat from other parts of his body to fill in the side temple area of his head.
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Jeremy Feldbusch can't see the results of the special cosmetic surgery he recently got -- but he's pleased when people tell him what a good job the doctors did.
Mr. Feldbusch is blind because a piece of artillery shrapnel tore through his skull in Iraq in 2003. In January, UPMC surgeon J. Peter Rubin took fat from his abdomen and thighs and injected it into cavities that his war injuries had left on his face.
The procedure smoothed out the depressions that bordered a metal plate in his forehead and filled in some "potholes" near his right eye, as Mr. Feldbusch put it.
When people who know him say his face looks a lot better, "that makes me feel good. I tell people it's like when they came out with the Reebok pump shoes -- you're pumping me up."
Dr. Rubin, recently named chief of the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at UPMC, has received $4.5 million from the Department of Defense for his fat resculpting project, and so far has performed the surgery on 11 injured veterans.
"There is a very high incidence of facial injuries in military trauma today," Dr. Rubin said. "Because the body armor is so advanced, our troops are surviving blasts that in previous conflicts would have taken their lives. So the extremities and head and face are more exposed."
Using techniques developed by New York plastic surgeon Sydney Coleman, who has assisted on the surgeries here, Dr. Rubin's team removes fat cells from a patient's body, centrifuges them to collect the most active cells, and injects them into injury sites using tiny tubes that can be as narrow as an intravenous needle.
Fat injections have been used in cosmetic surgery for years, but the problem has been that in many cases, the fat is absorbed by surrounding tissues and the work has to be done over.
Dr. Coleman's centrifuge technique is designed to prevent that by concentrating the fat cells, which helps them to thrive and grow new blood vessels once they are injected.
First Published March 6, 2011 12:00 am
