Expert perspectives for transoral robotic versus laser surgery for supraglottic carcinomas.

Objective: To assess the opinion, practices, and challenges of international key opinion leaders about two minimal invasive surgical techniques in supraglottic laryngeal tumours: transoral laser microsurgery (TLM) and the transoral robotic surgery (TORS).

Methods: Design of a questionnaire composed of seven sections and fifty questions covering descriptive data of participants, practitioners experience procedural sequences, considerations related to airways, feeding, and voice, intraoperative haemorrhage, postoperative management, and a comparative analysis of TLM and TORS in treating supraglottic laryngeal cancer.

Results: A total of 27 head and neck surgeons replied to the survey.

Functional or radical surgical treatment of laryngeal chondrosarcoma, analysis of survival and prognostic factors: A REFCOR and NetSarc-ResOs multicenter study of 74 cases.

Introduction: Laryngeal chondrosarcoma (LCS) is a rare tumor of slow evolution whose treatment is poorly codified. For a long time, a radical treatment by total laryngectomy (TL) was proposed. More recent studies tend to propose a conservative surgical approach of the larynx.

Germline mutations in the new E1' cryptic exon of the gene in patients with tumours of von Hippel-Lindau disease spectrum or with paraganglioma.

Backgrounds: The incidence of germline mutations in the newly discovered cryptic exon (E1') of gene in patients with von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) disease and in patients with paraganglioma or pheochromocytoma (PPGL) is not currently known.

Methods: We studied a large international multicentre cohort of 1167 patients with a previous negative genetic testing. Germline DNA from 75 patients with a single tumour of the VHL spectrum ('Single VHL tumour' cohort), 70 patients with multiple tumours of the VHL spectrum ('Multiple VHL tumours' cohort), 76 patients with a VHL disease as described in the literature ('VHL-like' cohort) and 946 patients with a PPGL were screened for E1' genetic variants.

Middle Ear Osteoma Causing Mixed Hearing Loss: A Case Report.

Osteomas of the middle ear are rare benign tumors. Their consequences and symptoms are due to their specific location, such as the promontory or the epitympanum and their contact with the facial nerve, the semicircular canal, the ossicles, and the oval or round windows. We report a very unusual case of middle ear osteoma (MEO) in a 23-year-old male patient causing a right mixed hearing loss by contacting and overwhelming the incus and stapes.

A New Membrane Obturator Prosthesis Concept for Soft Palate Defects.

When soft palate defects lead to palatal insufficiency, the patient's quality of life is affected by difficulties swallowing, hypernasality, and poor intelligibility of speech. If immediate surgical reconstruction is not an option, the patient may benefit from the placement of a rigid obturator prosthesis. Unfortunately, the residual muscle stumps are often unable to adequately move this stiff and inert obturator to properly restore the velopharyngeal valve function.

Meningeal carcinomatosis of the internal auditory meatus: clinical and imagery-aided differentiation.

Objectives: To describe difficulties in diagnosing meningeal carcinomatosis of the internal auditory meatus (IAM-MC).

Study Design: Retrospective case review.

Setting: Tertiary skull base surgery referral center.

Comparison between CT- and FDG-PET-defined target volumes for radiotherapy planning in head-and-neck cancers.

Nine patients with head-and-neck cancer underwent computerized tomography (CT) simulation and [(18)F]-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) to compare the radiotherapy target volumes. The PET volumes were delineated with an automatic segmentation based on the source-to-background ratio. The volume comparison showed a reduction and qualitative discrepancies between the PET- and CT-volumes.