Wound and scar outcomes of Meek micrografting versus Mesh grafting: an intra-patient randomized controlled trial
Hoste Febe, 2025
Burn injuries affect countless individuals each year. The World Health organization reports approximately 180,000 deaths every year from these injuries alone. The treatment of deep (burn) wounds often involves surgery, specifically a technique called ‘autologous skin grafting’. This means that patients donate a portion of their own healthy skin to cover their wounds. While this process creates a new wound in a controlled and sterile environment, by attaching the harvested healthy skin to the initial wound, it allows the initial wound to heal more effectively.
To ensure that this donor site is as small as possible, the healthy skin is expanded before attaching it to the initial wound. Surgeons can employ techniques like Meek micrografting or Mesh grafting.
Meek micrografting involves cutting the healthy skin into smaller, evenly spaced pieces. While Mesh grafting involves stretching and perforating the healthy skin.
Both methods aim to improve wound coverage and promote healing through maximizing the use of healthy available skin.
Meek micrografting can achieve a larger expansion than Mesh grafting. Therefore, Mesh skin grafting was designed to be used on smaller wounds. While Meek micrografting is traditionally used to treat extensive burns, because in patients with extensive burns there is limited healthy skin left to use as a donor site.
This sparked the idea to treat smaller burn wounds with Meek micrografting, as it requires a small donor site. This could reduce the disadvantages that patient face from having a large donor site wound.
The goal of this study is to determine which technique is superior, both in objective measurements and in the experience of patients themselves.
As mentioned earlier, many people suffer from burn injuries and other wounds. These significantly impact patients' physical, physiological, and psychological well-being. These wounds are not only responsible for functional deficits, but the aesthetic of for example hands and face are of great importance to be able to engage socially.
As a result, the treatment of these wounds is of great importance to reintegrate these patients back into society.
If we could find the superior technique to surgically treat these patients and if we were able to minimize the donor site wound, we could ideally reduce the mental, social and societal costs these wounds are responsible for. This includes reducing hospital stay, as well as reducing unemployment, and improving overall engagement in society.
| Promotor | Stan Monstrey |
| Opleiding | Geneeskunde |
| Domein | Chirurgie |
| Kernwoorden | Small (burn) wounds, skin grafting, the superior method |