Delayed Reconstruction of Ear Lobule With Conchal Cartilage Rotational Flap
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The earlobe plays a critical role in facial aesthetics and balance. Large, full-thickness defects of the earlobe present a unique reconstructive challenge due to the absence of cartilage and the need for long-term volume and contour maintenance. OBJECTIVE: To describe a novel 2-phase surgical technique for earlobe reconstruction utilizing a cartilage graft. METHODS: Between 2010 and 2019, 12 patients underwent earlobe reconstruction using this technique. In the first phase, a cheek flap was created, and a cartilage graft was harvested and implanted into the lobular defect. Six weeks later, the second phase involved refining the lobule with a V-Y advancement flap and grafting the posterior aspect with a full-thickness skin graft. Patient outcomes were evaluated based on patient satisfaction and complication rates. RESULTS: The cohort included 12 patients aged 29 to 82 years, comprising congenital deformities (n=3), traumatic arteriovenous malformations (n=2), and post-resection defects from skin malignancies (n=7). The technique was successfully applied across all cases, achieving aesthetically pleasing results with no recorded complications. CONCLUSION: This 2-phase reconstruction technique offers a reliable and effective solution for large earlobe defects. Further studies with larger cohorts and extended follow-up periods are needed to validate these findings.
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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) | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".