Barbed Sutures in Aesthetic Plastic Surgery: Evolution of Thought and Process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The evolution of barbed suture technologies and their application in the field of plastic surgery is now in its third decade. Much has been learned along the way. Initial excitement was often followed by disappointment as we learned more about the limited longevity of minimally invasive procedures and complications arising from various suture designs of the past. Some of the early designs, developed primarily for use in aesthetic facial procedures, included free-floating, bidirectionally barbed, nonabsorbable sutures; unidirectional barbed, nonabsorbable sutures; anchored, bidirectional, nonabsorbable double-threaded sutures; and a technology combining a nonabsorbable knotted thread and absorbable cones. More recently, a new, absorbable, unidirectional barbed suture design has become available. However, it should be noted that very limited data are available for any of the modified suture designs used in this field, and much of what has been published is based on the experience of a single user. The author has used the bidirectionally barbed Quill Knotless Tissue-Closure Device (Angiotech Pharmaceuticals, Inc, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), the most common barbed suture in both facial and other aesthetic plastic surgery procedures, with considerable success in various open aesthetic facial procedures, including suspension of the brow and midface, platysmaplasty, and lateral neck suspension. It is the author's experience that completion of 1 to 2 cases with this technology is sufficient to achieve competency in the closure techniques discussed in this article and that time savings can be realized using this device in various breast and body contouring procedures, including mastopexy, reduction mammoplasty, abdominoplasty, bodylift, and brachioplasty.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".