What is free-flap microsurgery?
The procedure involves completely detaching skin, fat and blood vessels — the flap — from one part of the body and moving them to the site of the mastectomy. There, they are reattached, with the artery and veins of the flap reconnected under magnification to the blood supply found in the mastectomy pocket and the skin and the fat shaped into a new breast. The free-flap has become the predominant breast-reconstruction technique at the Revlon/UCLA Breast Center, using the patient’s own tissue from the lower abdomen or buttocks at the time of the mastectomy.
