Flap (Surgery)

A surgical flap is a piece of tissue with its own intact blood supply that is lifted from a donor site and moved to a recipient site to repair a defect, which distinguishes it from a graft, a piece of tissue with no continuous blood supply of its own that must grow new vessels to survive. Flaps are used to close defects left by injury, tumor removal, or debridement that would otherwise risk fluid buildup or infection, to close wounds that cannot simply be stitched together, to reduce tension across a wound and so limit scarring and wound separation, and to rebuild complex structures such as a breast or jaw, sometimes incorporating muscle or bone to restore some function. Because a flap keeps its own blood supply, it generally heals more reliably than a graft in complex reconstructive surgery.