Accelerated Ossification of the Cochlear Aqueduct, TB‐Meningitis, and Hearing Loss: Are they related?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our prior work suggested that petro‐occipital fissure (POF) ossification may be altered in clinicopathologies of the cranial base such as hearing loss (Balboni et al., 2005, 2006; Balboni, 2006). Here we report on osseous changes in the cochlear aqueduct (CA), which lies at the posterior margin of the POF and provides a conduit between the inner ear and posterior cranial fossa. We examined and staged CA ossification patterns in normal adult crania (n=74) and tuberculosis meningitis (TBM) crania (n=11) from the Grant Collection at the University of Toronto. We demonstrate a statistically significant change (p < .05) in age‐related CA ossification between the TBM crania and normal crania. The dura and fibrous connective tissue of the CA undergoes a markedly accelerated ossification pattern in young adults with TBM compared to controls. This study suggests that the rate of ossification of the CA is accelerated with exposure to TBM. The well‐characterized biological mechanism of TBM, with its induction of dural inflammation along the posterior cranial fossa, suggests that the magnitude of localized inflammatory processes may underlie the rate CA ossification. This study ties TBM to measurable changes in CA morphology and points to a relationship between dural inflammation and CA ossification, and may also be implicated in the development of post‐meningitis hearing loss.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".