Quantification and visualization of aerosols in ear, nose, and throat exam and flexible laryngoscopy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: To measure and visualize aerosol generation during ear, nose, and throat (ENT) exam and flexible laryngoscopy, as safety recommendations are currently to defer routine and low-priority examinations. Methods: Aerosols generated during ENT examination and flexible laryngoscopy were quantified by laser aerosol spectrometry and visualized live by high-speed imaging during those procedures for three participants who were tested three times for each test. Results: Routine ENT examination and flexible laryngoscopy produce aerosols at levels comparable to normal breathing and speech. Conclusion: During ENT examination and flexible laryngoscopy, the practitioner should wear a surgical mask and potentially contaminated surfaces should be cleaned after the procedure. For flexible laryngoscopy, it is recommended in addition that the patient wear a mask over the mouth in case the procedure induces a sneeze. The time during which the patient is unmasked should be minimized. In these settings, the risk to the practitioner is minimal unless the patient is sneezing or symptomatic. Level of Evidence: 1.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".