Skull base or cervical vertebral osteomyelitis following chemoradiotherapy for pharyngeal carcinoma: A serious but treatable complication
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Osteomyelitis, infection of the bone and marrow, following high dose (chemo-)radiotherapy for head and neck cancer is uncommon and rarely seen in the cervical spine or temporal bone. Due to its proximity to critical structures, osteomyelitis in the latter regions could carry potentially important consequences. Furthermore, involvement near the skull base (e.g. temporal bone and high cervical vertebrae) presents unique challenges in diagnosis (especially in the differentiation from disease recurrence) and treatment, making early detection and timely intervention critical. In this report, we describe two cases of osteomyelitis, one involving the temporal bone and the other affecting the 2nd and 3rd cervical vertebrae, diagnosed and treated with good outcome in the setting of definitive chemoradiotherapy for locally advanced pharyngeal carcinomas. We suggest that for new or evolving post-radiotherapy osseous changes in regions that have received a high dose of radiotherapy, associated with unexpected and deteriorating spinal symptoms such as pain and spasm, radiation-related osteomyelitis should be considered in the differential diagnosis from tumor progression. Timely referral to a surgical oncologist and infectious diseases specialist is paramount in achieving satisfactory clinical outcomes.
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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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".