New Technique Alters Your Facial Appearance Without Surgery

A new type of medical procedure could help replace some kinds of painful, invasive surgeries.

By using electrical current and 3D-printed molds, doctors figured out how to soften and re-shape cartilage without making a single incision — a development that could significantly shorten the recovery time for medical procedures and make the whole process less painful.

Michael Hill, said in a press release, "We envision this new technique as a low-cost office procedure done under local anesthesia. The whole process would take about five minutes."

Aside from cosmetic surgeries that would reshape people’s noses or other features, the scientists envision their new technique being used to restore function to stiff joints or to repair people’s deviated septums. Down the road, the technique may be used on more than cartilage — perhaps even to repair corneas and fix eyesight.

Cartilage is connective tissue found throughout the human body at bone joints, between vertebrae, in the nose, at the ends of ribs, the ear, and in bronchial tubes. It's firm and rubbery, though it's actually made up of rigid collagen fibers woven together by polymers. Though the fibers are connected to one another other, the structure's otherwise been described as being like a clump of spaghettis dropped on a countertop. "If you picked it up, the strands wouldn't fall apart, but it would be floppy," says Hill.

More important to the new surgical technique is that cartilage contains charged particles: negatively charged proteins and positively charged sodium ions. The more charged particles, the more rigid the cartilage.

Hill and his colleagues discovered that they could soften cartilage to make it freely moldable by applying current to it. The current electrolyzes the water into oxygen and hydrogen ions with (positively charged) protons that cancel out the cartilage proteins' negative charge, causing it to soften. "Once the tissue is floppy," says Hill, "you can mold it to whatever shape you want." The cartilage can then be constrained into the desired form until it re-hardens in that shape.

The researchers have so far verified the efficacy of the technique on a rabbit's ears. After bending one of its otherwise straight-up ears and holding it in place with a mold, microneedle electrodes were inserted at the bend. Current was pulsed through them, softening the cartilage. After about 2 minutes, the current was shut off, the cartilage hardened in its new position, and the needles were removed with no damage to the site.

While further testing is obviously needed, it's hoped that this technique can be brought to bear in patients whose cartilage needs reshaping or repair. It may also be able to replace the cutting and painful recovery currently required in cosmetic surgery.