Disfigurement expertise

During the four phases of research, with the participation of 62 specialists in plastic and reconstructive surgery in total, a five-point ordinal scale was generated containing 217 disfigurements in total classified according to the criterion of five degrees of severity: very small, small, medium, large and very large orders. The established ordinal scale is the result of a scientific procedure and can be used for unified evaluation of severity of real disfig-urements in giving medico-legal expertise. The practical use of this scale as an instrument for giving medico-legal expertise of disfigurements is recommended. The results of this research indicate the need for their further verification in practice, as well as the need for potential corrections of the degrees of disfigurements, the number of individual descriptions of disfigurements, the establishment of new disfigurements or, additionally, more precise definition of existing disfigurements. Author, dr Vesna Rakic Vesna Rakic, born in 1965 in Belgrade, graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Belgrade and attended and finished the residency program in plastic, reconstructive and aesthetic surgery. She defended her Master thesis in 2010 in the field of Neurosurgery on the topic of Basal cell carcinoma of the scalp in the Pt4 stage. In April, 2017, she defended her doctoral thesis at the School of Medicine in Belgrade in the field of forensic medicine on the following topic: Model of medico-legal classification of disfigurements resulting from surgery, injury, disease and treatment. She is a member of Serbian Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons - SRBPRAS as well as of the international society ISAPS. She has been working at the Clinical Center of Serbia since 2001. In the field of aesthetic surgery she has performed numerous pro-cedures, such as: surgical operations of the nose, eyelids, ears, breast augmentation, liposuction and abdominoplasty. She has performed more than 5000 surgeries of skin tumors under local anesthesia and a number of surgeries under general anesthesia in the field of breast reconstruction, surgical operations of melanoma, pilonidal sinus, skin ulcers, scars and contractures and decubitus. In the field of burns, she has performed a large number of necroctomies, tangential excisions, auto and homotransplantations with daily treatment and monitoring of the most severe cases of patients in intensive care units at the burn ward. She has published professional and scientific papers in world-renowned journals. Read more