Double fat plane of the radial forearm free flap and its implications for the microvascular surgeon.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: The radial forearm free flap (RFFF) is a workhorse in reconstruction of head and neck defects. The superficial cephalic vein is used most commonly for microvascular anastomosis; however, this vein has a variable course in the subcutaneous tissues. We have routinely isolated the cephalic vein within a reliable double fat plane, which has not been previously described. This study demonstrates the consistency of the cephalic vein within this double fat plane using a cadaveric model and our prospective operative experience raising the RFFF. METHOD: Four lightly preserved cadavers and one fresh cadaver were dissected by elevating a RFFF, identifying the double fat plane, and isolating the cephalic vein within this plane. Between August 2006 and April 2008, we prospectively recorded the anatomic location of the cephalic vein in 35 patients who had RFFF surgery. RESULTS: The double fat plane and cephalic vein were identified in all cadaveric dissections. The double fat plane was identified and led to injury-free dissection of the cephalic vein in all 35 patients. DISCUSSION: To our knowledge, this is the first report of the presence of the double fat plane within the subcutaneous tissue of the radial forearm and its use as a consistent landmark in finding the cephalic vein. Our cadaveric studies and operative observations have demonstrated that the double fat plane is a reliable, consistent, and helpful guide for the isolation of the cephalic vein in RFFF surgery.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".