Watch Dr. Lamperti carve two alar batten grafts from a patient's harvested septal cartilage.

In this intra-operative video Dr. Lamperti shows how he carves alar batten grafts using a patient's own septal cartilage that was harvested during septoplasty surgery. The batten grafts will ultimately be used as surgical breathe right strips to treat external nasal valve weakness.

Video transcript:

"This is Seattle facial plastic surgeon, Dr. Thomas Lamperti. Today I'm here to talk to you about how to carve an alar batten graft. The first step is to carve a piece of cartilage off of the harvested septal cartilage in this case. We'll first trim the rough size that we want and then we'll begin to bevel the edges. The idea to is make sure that there are no sharp edges and so that the graft is hidden quite well in the external nasal valve area. People often wonder, and you're probably wondering, how do you decide what size to make the graft? And this is typically done real time during the case where I'll actually measure the size of the external nasal valve weakness in the patient. I'll then translate that into the actual dimensions of the graft that I'm making. You can see that I've moved on to carving the second graft creating a similar type of bevelled appearance. You can see how the graft are oval shaped to roughly translate to the area of the external nasal valve. Once I fine tune the edges and bevel some more -- you can see how we can shave the corners off of the graft and smooth and make the transition natural before inserting them. And in part 2 of our video series I'll show you how we insert these batten grafts."