Methylene blue (MB) is both a dye and a medicine known and used for a long time including as lymphatic tracer in melanoma and breast cancer for revealing sentinel lymph nodes. Proflavine (PRO) is an acriflavine dye, used as bacteriostatic disinfectant against many gram-positive bacteria that was also successfully applied to evaluate morphopathological changes in tissues. This study was performed on a group of twenty-eight Wistar rats and had as its main objective the in vivo evaluation of the use of MB and PRO as perforator tracers. The two dyes proved to be effective functional perforasome tracers with medium inflammatory infiltrate in the skin of the island perforator flap which heals perfectly at 14 days with complete absence of the inflammatory reaction. At the same injected amount, PRO seems to determine a greater inflammatory reaction compared with MB, but in smaller concentration, the inflammatory response is absent in the case of PRO. In conclusion, both substances tested within this in vivo study are good functional perforasome tracers, but PRO has the advantage of the absence of inflammatory reaction when using lower concentrations, while preserving unalerted its efficiency as tracer.
Keywords: in vivo study; methylene blue; perforasome tracer; proflavine; sentinel lymph nodes.