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Manual dermatomes designed to expand large, uniform-thickness skin slices, increasing the area of damaged skin that can be covered with a given graft. These dermatomes are typically manually operated, benchtop instruments that include a drum, a handle, a graft fixation piece, and a set of cutting blades. The blades are used to perform parallel superficial cuttings on a previously excised graft (i.e., to expand the graft as a mesh), improving graft stretching capabilities and making the graft permeable to subcutaneous secretions. Expanded mesh dermatomes facilitate skin graft conformance to the contour of damaged (e.g., burnt) skin areas.
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