The process for facial implant design and surgery revolves around your personal needs from start to finish.
1. Consultation
Your first consultation with our specialist will give you the opportunity to outline your concerns to us in detail, where you feel improvements can be made, and what your ultimate goals are with treatment.
We will provide you with all of your options for achieving your goals, which may include surgery procedures as alternatives or complements to a customised facial implants.
2. Design
If you decide to proceed, we'll arrange for you to have medical CT scanning, which we use to digitally reconstruct your facial structures. With this we design your custom implant in the virtual world.
This will demonstrate the changes that are possible to your facial structures, and will provide a digital simulation showing the transformation to your soft tissue profile.
3. Surgery
Your facial implant surgery will be performed in a private hospital setting under general anaesthesia. This will be coordinated by our highly experienced and caring administrative staff.
Implant surgery is performed through small incisions made in the mouth. The soft tissue is gently lifted away from the bony structures underneath, creating space for the implant to be positioned.
The implants are secured in place with small titanium screws. Over the following months, your implant will fuse to the underlying skeletal structures supporting it.
Jawline implants are made from PEEK, the most commonly used material for reconstructive surgery as its properties are similar to human bone.
Before PEEK became the mainstream medical material of choice, titanium was most commonly used as it shares the important property of promoting fusion with the underlying bone.
PEEK offers many advantages over titanium, in that it is light-weight, highly durable, more comfortable, flexible and promotes faster healing than any other type of implant material.
PEEK facial implants are computer designed for the specific needs of each patient, creating the ideal 3D contour for optimal aesthetics and a precise fitting surface for ease of placement.
Other types of jawline implants don't share the functional or aesthetic qualities of PEEK implants.
Implants come in a range of sizes and applications, including chin (A), jaw ramus (B), cheekbone (C), and piriform or lateral alae (D).
- Silicon Implants come in a range of off-the-shelf sizes, and while flexible, they are notorious for being very hard to accurately locate and hard to stably fixate. They also resorb away underlying bone in a process called embedding erosion.
- Expanded or porous polyethylene is extremely stiff and difficult to resize and accurately fit. A kind of hard fibrotic tissue invades the porous surface, making overlying skin and muscle extremely hard and removal almost impossible.
- With 3D printing of the patient’s jaws, wax buildups can be made in a maxillofacial prosthetic laboratory. This can be optically scanned, and zirconia implants accurately manufactured in the laboratory.
- Alternatively, this can be converted to PMMA. Both zirconia and PMMA implants are extremely tissue inert, and zirconia can potentially integrate with bone.
When comparing all of these implants, only the combination of remedial BIMAX with custom PEEK implants gives the potential to combine full reconstruction with the long-term benefits of implant durability and ideal tissue compatibility.
