Systematic Review of Endoscopic Obliteration Techniques for Managing Congenital Piriform Fossa Sinus Tracts in Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Piriform fossa sinus tracts (PFSTs) are a recognized cause of recurrent deep neck infections in the pediatric population. Conventional management has historically required open resection, but over recent years minimally invasive endoscopic approaches to obliterate the pharyngeal opening of the sinus have been performed in many centers. However, there is a lack of clear evidence regarding the success rate and safety of these approaches. OBJECTIVE: To determine the success rate of endoscopic management of PFST through a systematic review of the existing literature. DATA SOURCES: MEDLINE (1964-2014) and bibliographies of identified papers. REVIEW METHODS: Two authors independently reviewed 170 abstracts and identified relevant studies for full-text review. Data were independently extracted from those studies, and the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine guidelines were used to classify the level of evidence. RESULTS: Thirteen studies met the inclusion criteria, comprising a total of 84 patients. All included studies were evidence level 4 (case series). Various methods of obliterating the PFST were described: electrocautery (n = 39), laser (n = 19), trichloroacetic acid (n = 19), silver nitrate (n = 4), combination of silver nitrate and laser (n = 2), and fibrin glue (n = 1). The success rate for endoscopic management of PFST was 89.3% overall (90.5% in primary cases and 85.7% in revision cases). The only adverse event reported was temporary vocal cord immobility in 2.4% (n = 2) of cases. CONCLUSION: Endoscopic management of pediatric PFST appears to be safe and effective, as a primary option and for revision after open surgery.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".