ISPRES Annual Meeting

The 1st Annual Meeting of the International Society of Plastic Regenerative Surgery (ISPRES) begins this Friday in Rome, Italy. World opinion leaders in the emerging science and art of fat grafting for breast reconstruction and augmentation will be there to discuss their experience in this exciting field. They include Gino Rigotti from Italy, Emmanuel Delay of France, Roger Khouri of the US, and Kotaro Yoshimura of Japan.

I will be presenting my experience with using cryopreserved banked fat for fat grafting for the face and breast and particularly for breast reconstruction.  The title of my presentation is Cryopreserved Fat Grafting in Clinical Practice.I have had the opportunity to put the science of fat banking into clinical practice for my patients. Our initial experience is very encouraging with clear survival of cryopreserved fat comparable to other fat grafting procedures. Our results appear to confirm the initial studies that show that using our fat banking process, a much higher percentage of graft survival can be expected than previous studies that simply use frozen fat. Cryopreservation is a much more complex process than simply freezing fat. The process involves freezing the fat very slowly, in a computer controlled freezer to prevent damage to the fat, and adding standard FDA approved cryoprotectants to preserve the tissue during the freezing and thawing process.

-Dr. Jeffry Hartog, M.D.