48. Silicone Taping for The Improvement of Abdominal Donor Site Scars Following Autologous Breast Reconstruction: A Randomized, Prospective Self-controlled Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: Silicone-based products improve the appearance of abdominal scars after surgical procedures1, but uptake is limited in resource-restricted environments due to device cost. Does standard silicone scar tape improve self-reported and surgeon-reported scar appearance in post-surgical abdominal scars? METHODS: A prospective single-center single-blind randomized self-control clinical trial was performed on 41 sequentially recruited and consented DIEP autologous breast reconstruction patients. Using a split-scar methodology, silicone scar tape was applied to the randomized side of the abdominal scar 2 weeks post-operatively and worn 24 hours per day for three months. The Patient and Observer Scar Assessment Scale (POSAS) was completed at 6 weeks, 3-, 6-, and 12-months. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were performed to detect statistical significance in patient and observer scar scores. RESULTS: The primary outcome (Total Observer Score) by blinded surgeon-observers was clinically and statistically improved with silicone tape at 3 and 6 months post-operatively (p=0.0005, p=0.0025). Observer overall impression scores were significant at 6 weeks, 3 and 6 months (p=0.0496, p=0.0015, p=0.0067), indicating improved scar appearance with silicone tape. CONCLUSION: This single-blind RCT supports the efficacy of affordable silicone taping to improve early scar appearance of post-surgical abdominal scars.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".