Therapeutic options and postoperative wound complications after extremity soft tissue sarcoma resection and postoperative external beam radiotherapy.

Soft tissue sarcomas occur most commonly in the lower and upper extremities. The standard treatment is limb salvage surgery combined with radiotherapy. Postoperative radiotherapy is associated with wound complications.

Burned ear: the use of a staged Nagata technique for ear reconstruction.

Four features, manifested in various combinations, characterise deformity in the burned ear: (i) the presence of scarred skin at the site of and surrounding the ear, with dramatic loss of skin elasticity; (ii) the presence of longitudinal scars of the pinna due to previous drainage of the perichondritis as an initial trial for saving the ear; (iii) absence of different components of the framework of the ear, mostly the helix/antihelix complex (the cartilage-containing part) with or without the ear lobule; (iv) scarred chest wall due to associated burns of the skin of the chest. In the face of these deformities, the surgical goals for auricular reconstruction include the following: (i) removal of the remaining cartilage of the burned ear, part or the whole of it in severe cases, because it may be a source of infection; (ii) wide exposure of the cartilage of the ribs through sufficient chest wall incision to overcome the severe fibrosis of the burned chest wall skin; (iii) creation of delicate smooth cartilage framework, free of sharp edges; (iv) creation of a skin pocket of sufficient size. Eight patients with a unilateral or bilateral deformity of the ear following burns were operated on during the period from May 2006 to July 2007, with a median age of 23.