Project Description:

Free flap procedure is a reconstructive surgical technique that involves transfer of autologous tissue with its vascular pedicle to a recipient site. At the recipient site, vessels are reconnected using microsurgical anastomosis. However, the anastomotic site is vulnerable to postoperative thrombosis which can cause rapid blood flow compromise, leading to ischemia and ultimately tissue death, unless detected within one hour.

The current gold standard – hourly manual flap monitoring – is labor-intensive, diverting clinician time from other patient care duties. Existing solutions, while sensitive, have high false positive rates, which causes alarm fatigue in clinical staff and may lead to true flap compromise being overlooked. Undetected flap failure leads to costly revision surgeries, prolonged hospital stays, and increased psychological burden on the patient.

Our solution is continuous, self-referencing, multimodal sensor that provides a single flap health score to predict flap failure, streamlining the traditionally arduous process of postoperative monitoring.

Project Photo:

Our continuous, self-referencing, multimodal sensors for free flap monitoring can eliminate alarm fatigue, significantly reduce nursing time dedicated to monitoring, and provide customizable, remote access to flap health.