A systematic review of anterolateral thigh flap donor site morbidity
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: The anterolateral thigh (ALT) flap is widely used in reconstruction. Its advantage over other flaps is its purported minimal donor site morbidity. The present systematic review summarizes the types of complications and their incidence with this flap. A secondary objective is to delineate factors that influence these complications and make recommendations to avoid them. METHOD: Two independent assessors undertook a systematic review of the literature using multiple databases. All patients with ALT flap reconstruction for any defect were included. Donor site complications including lateral thigh paresthesia, musculoskeletal dysfunction, hypertrophic scarring, wound breakdown, infection, donor site pain, seroma, hematoma, compartment syndrome and muscle necrosis were extracted from identified articles and tabulated. Based on the number of pooled events and the number of cases performed, an incidence rate was calculated. RESULTS: Forty-two relevant articles were identified that included 2324 flaps. Of the 2324 flaps, the majority were fasciocutaneous (n=737), and 1303 of the flaps were used in head and neck reconstruction. The incidence of complications were: lateral thigh paresthesia (24.0%); musculoskeletal dysfunction (4.8%); hypertrophic scarring or wound dehiscence (4.8%); donor site pain (3.3%); seroma (2.4%); infection (2.2%); hematoma (0.7%); compartment syndrome (0.09%); and partial muscle necrosis (0.09%). CONCLUSION: Lateral thigh paresthesia is the most common complication. Severe complications such as compartment syndrome and muscle necrosis can occur, but are rare. Preservation of the lateral cutaneous nerve of the thigh, femoral motor nerve branches and deep fascia decreases the risk of complications. The degree of vastus lateralis disruption did not show a significant impact on musculoskeletal dysfunction.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it