The symmetry of paediatric tympanograms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives. The poorer outcome of myringoplasty in children in comparison with adults is commonly attributed to poor Eustachian tube function. The only routine test giving an indication of Eustachian tube function is tympanometry. It is common practice to look at the contralateral tympanogram as a predictor of the child's Eustachian tube function when deciding whether to proceed with myringoplasty. This relies on the assumption that Eustachian tube function is symmetrical. This study seeks to assess whether this assumption is correct. Method. We collected copies of 297 pairs of tympanograms carried out in a paediatric ENT clinic over a ten‐month period. We compared the symmetry of tympanograms of children aged from 5 to 16 years. Results. We looked at the association between normal Eustachian tube functions (type A) or abnormal Eustachian tube function (type B, C1 or C2) in one ear and Eustachian tube function in the other ear. A type‐A tympanogram in one ear predicted a type‐A tympanogram in the other ear with a sensitivity of 0.81 (95% CI 0.74–0.86) and specificity of 0.75 (0.66–0.82). The positive predictive value of a type‐A tympanogram was 0.82 (0.75–0.87) and the negative predictive value was 0.73 (0.65–0.81). Conclusions. There is a good correlation of Eustachian tube function, as demonstrated by tympanometry, between the ears of a child. If Eustachian tube function does have an impact on myringoplasty outcome then the contralateral tympanogram should provide some help in the decision on timing of myringoplasty.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.048 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".