Micro‐CT of the human ossicular chain: Statistical shape modeling and implications for otologic surgery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ossicular chain is a middle ear structure consisting of the small incus, malleus and stapes bones, which transmit tympanic membrane vibrations caused by sound to the inner ear. Despite being shown to be highly variable in shape, there are very few morphological studies of the ossicles. The objective of this study was to use a large sample of cadaveric ossicles to create a set of three-dimensional models and study their statistical variance. Thirty-three cadaveric temporal bone samples were scanned using micro-computed tomography (μCT) and segmented. Statistical shape models (SSMs) were then made for each ossicle to demonstrate the divergence of morphological features. Results revealed that ossicles were most likely to vary in overall size, but that more specific feature variability was found at the manubrium of the malleus, the long process and lenticular process of the incus, and the crura and footplate of the stapes. By analyzing samples as whole ossicular chains, it was revealed that when fixed at the malleus, changes along the chain resulted in a wide variety of final stapes positions. This is the first known study to create high-quality, three-dimensional SSMs of the human ossicles. This information can be used to guide otological surgical training and planning, inform ossicular prosthesis development, and assist with other ossicular studies and applications by improving automated segmentation algorithms. All models have been made publicly available.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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".