Donor Site Scar Preference in Patients Requiring Free Flap Reconstruction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: In traumatic reconstruction, surgeons frequently harvest flaps from donor sites that they are comfortable performing and with favourable tissue characteristics without determining the patients preferred site. The study's goal was to determine participants free flap donor site preference based on aesthetics as it relates to the size of the defect being reconstructed. METHODOLOGY: Participants were asked to imagine that they were in a trauma that resulted in a wound of variable sizes. They were presented with a selection of common donor site scars produced from harvesting small, medium, and large free flaps. They were instructed to rank the donor sites in order of preference and score each donor site of 10. RESULTS: Two hundred eighty-seven participants (mean age: 28, female: 62%) completed the survey. For small reconstructions, the preferred donor site scars were on the leg or back compared to arm or abdomen. For medium size reconstructions, scars on the back and upper thigh were preferred over scars on the abdomen and anterior thigh. In small and medium reconstructions, the midline abdominal scar scored significantly lower than other donor sites. Participants preferred donor sites on the back, the thigh, and lower abdomen for large reconstructions. CONCLUSION: Participants preferred back, thigh, and hip locations perhaps relating to the ability to conceal these scars under clothing. If multiple flaps sites could be harvested, providing options to trauma patients undergoing free tissue transfer may result in increased satisfaction.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| 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".