JOURNAL OF PLASTIC RECONSTRUCTIVE AND AESTHETIC SURGERY, cilt.62, sa.9, ss.1140-1147, 2009 (SCI-Expanded)
Background: The deep inferior epigastric artery perforator (DIEAP) flap is a technically demanding procedure and the dissection is directly influenced by the size of the perforator vessels. There is a common belief that the size of the superficial inferior epigastric vein (SIEV) is inversely proportional to the perforators from the deep inferior epigastric system. To investigate the validity of this hypothesis, we evaluated and compared the diameters of the SIEV and deep inferior epigastric perforator vessels (DIEP-A and DIEP-V).