[The design and transposition principles of expanded flap for treatment of cheek skin-soft tissue defect].
OBJECTIVE
To explore an ideal method for repairing the skin-soft tissue defects according to the different anatomical units of cheek, and find reasonable design principles to transfer the expanded flaps.


METHODS
According to the location of the defect, we placed 1-3 appropriate expanders nearby, when the flap expanded enough we adopted advanced skin flaps, rotation-advanced skin flaps or transposition skin flaps to repair the defect. In this group of 269 cases, the defects were secondary to hemangioma, various scars, nevus or nevus excision.


RESULTS
In all 269 cheek defects, 305 expanded flaps were developed which included 145 rotation-advanced flaps, 121 advanced skin flaps and 39 transposition skin flaps. 52 of them generated complications, including blood circulation disorder of the distal part of flaps, hematoma, infection, injection, lower eyelid ectropion, expander extrusion and capsule contracture. Mostly, these complications didn't affect the final results.


CONCLUSIONS
The principles presented in this article are the guidelines to treat the skin-soft tissue defect of check with tissue expansion. The satisfied results come from the reasonable flap designs.
Hu
Shou-duo
SD
Plastic Surgery Hospital of Chinese Academy Science, Beijing 100041, China.
Zhang
Hai-ming
HM
Zhao
Cheng-peng
CP
Feng
Yue-jian
YJ
Yang
Yu
Y
Han
Xing
X
Zhuang
Hong-xing
HX
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002610:Cheek / Q000601:surgery*; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D019651:Plastic Surgery Procedures / Q000379:methods*; D016038:Skin Transplantation / Q000379:methods*; D013524:Surgical Flaps; D015626:Tissue Expansion / Q000379:methods*; D055815:Young Adult