Neonatal pre-auricular pits/sinuses: Survey of management strategies by pediatric otolaryngologists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Neonatal preauricular pit/sinus is a benign embryologic remnant of the first or second branchial arches. The estimated incidence in the US is 1 to 9/1000 newborns, higher in East Asian babies. Most remain asymptomatic throughout life. Inflammatory complications include discharge of squamous debris, cellulitis, or frank abscess. The purpose of this study was to survey pediatric otolaryngologists in the United States and Canada about management strategies for asymptomatic and symptomatic preauricular pits/sinuses. Study Design: A 15-item structured questionnaire covering questions on demographics, professional experience, and medical and surgical management of congenital preauricular pits/sinuses were sent by e-mail and selectively by regular mail to 273 members of the American Society of Pediatric Otolaryngology. Results: 175 of 273 responses (64%) were evaluable. 85% of respondents would simply observe cases of asymptomatic preauricular pit/sinus. Regarding further evaluation, 122 respondents (70%) would not recommend anything other than routine neonatal hearing screen, without need for repeat hearing tests in the first two years of life; 34 (19%) would also get BAER hearing test and a renal ultrasound. If a sinus drains sebaceous material intermittently, 65% of the surveyed pediatric otolaryngologists would recommend excision. Ninety nine percent of pediatric ENT respondents would excise a recurrently infected preauricular sinus. Conclusion: Watchful waiting, without requirement of periodic hearing tests in the first 24 months of life is certainly acceptable for management of neonatal asymptomatic preauricular pit/sinus. There is universal agreement that recurrently infected preauricular sinuses should be referred to a pediatric otolaryngologist for surgical excision of the fistulous tract.
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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 | 0.004 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".