Percentage of graft viability versus injected volume in adipose autotransplants.

An adipose tissue graft's ability to obtain nutrition through plasmatic imbibition occurs approximately 1.5 mm from the vascularized edge. This and the observation that only 40% of this peripheral margin is viable led the authors to create spherical and cylindroid models to correlate the volume and the percentage of graft viability to the initial injected volume in adipose autotransplants. The authors concluded that the percentage of graft viability depends on the thickness and the geometrical shape and is inversely proportional to the graft diameter if grafts with a diameter greater than 3 mm are considered.