Progress and outlook of skin soft tissue expansion

As a revolutionary plastic treatment, skin soft tissue expansion has become one of the three conventional techniques of plastic surgery after skin grafting and flap transplantation. At present, expansion is widely used in the treatment of various lesions in multiple parts of the body. It plays an irreplaceable role in many areas such as scar repair, alopecia treatment, ear, nose, breast, penis and other organ reconstruction and surface tumor management. In recent years, the application of expansion has been constantly evolving, and it has renewed its vitality by combining with new technologies. However, the prevention and treatment of complications of expansion should be paid more attention, the expansion efficiency needs to be improved, the basic research on the skin regeneration mechanism and micro-environment changes of expansion is still lacking, and further exploration is needed. Based on this, the clinical application principles, new progress and experimental exploration of skin soft tissue expansion were reviewed and summarized, and the possible development directions were analyzed. Key words: Skin soft tissue expansion; Updates; Clinical application; Experimental study