The use of thoracodorsal artery perforator flap in oncoplastic procedures / Tarek Mohamed Hashem ; Supervised Ayman A. Amin , Mohammed A. Rifaat , Ahmed Farahat

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - National Cancer Institute - Department of Oncology - Surgical

To evaluate the outcome of thoracodorsal artery perforator flap in oncoplastic procedures regarding operative time, post operative complications and cosmetic outcome. The advent of oncoplastic surgery in the early 1990s has revolutionized the concepts of breast reconstruction for breast cancer.This has been paralleled by a steep evolution of our understanding of the vascular anatomy of the various flaps used for reconstruction. Earlier when mastectomies where prevailing, it made perfect sense to look for flaps with large volumes of tissue and muscle bulk such as the TRAM or the conventional LD flaps. The harvest of these flaps often left significant morbidities such as the abdominal wall weakness and the seroma in the back. Nowadays the breast surgeon is more than often faced with smaller defects for which such bulky flaps offer a surplus of tissue with unacceptable morbidities compared to the smaller defects these flaps have to reconstruct. Moreover the aesthetic result is often jeopardized by the bulge of the muscle. The advent of perforator flaps has enabled us to reconstruct these smaller breast defects with more limited flaps based on perforating branches of the main thoracodorsal pedicle

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