After the first hemipelvectomy in 1891 significant advances have been made in the fields of preoperative diagnosis, surgical technique and adjuvant treatment in patients with pelvic tumors. The challenging surgical removal of these rare malignant bone or soft tissue tumors accompanied by interdisciplinary therapy is mostly the only chance of cure, but bares the risk of intensive bleeding and in...

AIM Muscular flaps are considered by many surgeons as a treatment of choice for pressure sores. Nevertheless fasciocutaneous and adipofascial flaps are less sensitive to ischemia, more resistant to pressure and have higher mechanical resistance. The aim of this study is to evaluate the results of our integrated rehabilitative and surgical protocol in pressure sore management based on the use of...

SUMMARY Advancements in microsurgical techniques as applied to perforator flaps have made harvesting flaps in a free-style manner a practical reality. A hand-held Doppler identifies sizable perforators on which flaps can be based. In free-style free flap harvesting, any region of the body can be chosen as a donor site as long as there is an audible pulsatile Doppler signal. The value of the fre...

BACKGROUND The list of complications reported after decompressive craniectomy (DC) and cranioplasty is progressively increasing. Nonetheless, the exact incidence of these events is still ill-defined. Problems affecting skin flaps after DC and cranioplasty have never been accurately analyzed in papers and their impact on patients' prognosis is largely underestimated. METHODS In a 10-year time,...

AIM The aim of this study was to evaluate almost 20 years of using the pectoralis major flap in head and neck reconstruction at the Department of Maxillofacial Surgery, Zagreb. PATIENTS In the period from 1981 to 1999, a total of 506 pectoralis major flaps were used for head and neck reconstruction in 500 patients. In all cases the flap was used after surgical resection of an advanced maligna...

Wound healing and infection is a concern for all surgeons, especially in cases of repeat surgical intervention. The osteoplastic flap is a technique that was previously used frequently in cranial surgery but since the introduction of cranial plating systems, it is now used only rarely. A retrospective study showed that although the infection rates of osteoplastic flaps were similar to free flap...

BACKGROUND surgical excision remains the best tool for management of skin tumors affecting nasal skin, however many surgical techniques have been used for reconstruction of the nasal defects caused by excisional surgery. The aim of this work is the evaluation of the feasibility and outcome of levator anguli oris muscle based flaps. METHODS Ninety patients of malignant nasal skin tumours were ...

Breast reconstruction using free tissue transfer is an increasingly utilised oncoplastic procedure. The aim was to review all bilateral breast reconstructions using abdominal free flaps by a single surgeon over an 11-year period (2003-2014). A retrospective review was performed on all patients who underwent bilateral breast reconstruction using abdominal free flaps between 2003 and 2014 by the ...

The reconstruction of loss of substance due to trauma or oncological excision may have relevant functional and aesthetic implications. We report our experience in twenty-one cases of propeller flaps for the treatment of loss of substance of the upper and lower limbs. The etiology of defect was tumor excision in nine cases, trauma in seven cases, surgical wound complications in four cases, and c...

AIM To compare the outcomes of finger reconstruction using arterialized venous flap (AVF), superficial palmar branch of the radial artery (SPBRA) flap, posterior interosseous perforator flap (PIPF), and ulnar artery perforator free (UAPF) flap harvested from the ipsilateral extremity. METHODS We retrospectively reviewed the outcomes for 41 free flaps from the ipsilateral extremity in the reco...