Why Do Some Children Have Good Hearing Results Following Type III and IV Tympanoplasty? Current Theories of Middle Ear Mechanics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Middle ear reconstruction in children following tympanomastoidectomy for cholesteatoma is commonly limited to a Wullstein type III or IV reconstruction owing to ossicular erosion. The hearing outcomes of this procedure have been unpredictable. Nevertheless, there are children who have remarkably good hearing results despite having extensive and aggressive cholesteatoma surgery and limited reconstruction. METHODS: The current theories of middle ear mechanics following tympanoplasty and ossicular reconstruction are reviewed. In addition, a selective retrospective chart review of pediatric type III and IV tympanoplasty at The Hospital for Sick Children between 1998 and 2003 is presented. RESULTS: Nine patients were reconstructed with a type III (n = 3) or IV (n = 6) tympanoplasty. The mean pre- and postoperative air-bone gaps were 43.6 and 24.9 dB. Speech reception threshold improved from 37.5 to 22.8 dB. The changes were statistically significant (p < .05). CONCLUSIONS: This series of patients demonstrated a statistically significant hearing improvement at long-term follow-up. The improvements are consistent with optimal hearing outcomes predicted by current theories of middle ear mechanics.
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 | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".