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  • Sientra's Shaped Breast Implant: Marking the Patient For Surgery
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The first thing we do is we start by marking the midline of the patient's chest. The next thing I do is I just outline the overall footprint of the patient's breast. I talked about the need to increase this distance on her. So based on the size of the implant we're going to use and the base width of the implant, this distance when we stretch out our skin from her nipple down to her chest wall, that needs to be about 9 centimeters. You don't want to go too far inwards when creating the implant pocket, because it runs the risk of creating something called symmastia. So this is going to mark the most medial border of our dissection, and then underneath I'm just going to mark the level of what the anticipated inframammary fold is going to be.

And, again, you can see that this line is a little lower than that line, which is relative to her nipple position, and this one's a little bit higher relative to that nipple position. If this distance, if there's a big difference between those two, when you put the implants in and you have it settle out at this level, you can really sometimes notice a big difference up above. Hers isn't very much different so I don't think it'll be very noticeable. This particular implant is about 13.5 centimeters tall. We'll give her a little extra centimeter here. So we need to create a pocket that goes up to about this level and is about that wide. With these shaped, textured anatomic implants, it's essential to very accurately dissect the implant pocket so that the tissues fit like a glove around the implant. Okay, my dear. I think you're all ready to go.

Sientra's Shaped Breast Implant: Marking the Patient For Surgery

Dr. Braden Stridde demonstrates how a patient is marked before her breast augmentation surgery. So THAT'S what those lines mean!