Objective This study aimed to compare hearing and anatomical outcomes after ossicular chain reconstruction with titanium or hydroxyapatite prostheses. Methods In this study, patients who underwent tympanoplasty and ossicular chain reconstruction with titanium or hydroxyapatite prostheses at a university hospital from January 2007 to February 2013 were retrospectively reviewed; they had a mini...

INTRODUCTION The aim of this study was to evaluate the condition of the ossicular chain in patients requiring surgery for cholesteatoma. MATERIALS AND METHODS In a retrospective analysis, the destruction of the individual and combined bony structures of the ear was described in 166 patients with cholesteatoma who went through surgery in our Otology Center between 2003 and 2009. RESULTS Tota...

Introduction Titanium implants can be regarded as the current gold standard for restoration of sound transmission in the middle ear following destruction of the ossicular chain by chronic inflammation. Many efforts have been made to improve prosthesis design, while less attention had been given to the role of the interface. We present a study on chemical nanocoating on microstructured titanium ...

In order to better understand signal propagation in the ear, a time-domain model of the tympanic membrane (TM) and of the ossicular chain (OC) is derived for the cat. Ossicles are represented by a two-port network and the TM is discretized into a series of transmission lines, each one characterized by its own delay and reflection coefficient. Volume velocity samples are distributed along the ea...

INTRODUCTION Despite advances in imaging and other diagnostic tests, it is often impossible to establish with confidence a pre-operative diagnosis in a patient with a conductive hearing loss. METHODS We studied a series of 340 exploratory tympanotomies for conductive hearing loss carried out by a single surgeon. RESULTS The most common operative diagnosis was otosclerosis (n = 164, 48.2 per...

It remains to be demonstrated that normal, day-to-day routine surgery is as effective as it would appear from the literature, where the results of very experienced surgeons are presented. The object of this study was to measure our performance for ossicular chain reconstructions. One hundred and thirty-eight total and partial reconstructions performed by 13 different surgeons were evaluated. Th...

The effect of 0.3% otic solution of ofloxacin on the cartilages constituting the epiphyses of the auditory ossicles and the wall of the auditory tube was histologically examined after 30-day repeated intratympanic administration to juvenile male guinea pigs aged 4 weeks. Ofloxacin showed no chondrotoxicity for the cartilages and, in some but not all animals, reduced haemorrhage and neutrophil i...