A Novel Ear Impression-Taking Method Using Structured Light Imaging and Machine Learning: A Pilot Proof of Concept Study with Patients' Feedback on Prototype.

Introduction: Taking an ear impression is a minimally invasive procedure. A review of existing literature suggests that contactless methods of scanning the ear have not been developed. We proposed to establish a correlation between external ear features with the ear canal and with this proof of concept to develop a prototype and an algorithm for capturing and predicting ear canal information.

Classification, registration and segmentation of ear canal impressions using convolutional neural networks.

Today, fitting bespoke hearing aids involves injecting silicone into patients' ears to produce ear canal molds. These are subsequently 3D scanned to create digital ear canal impressions. However, before digital impressions can be used they require a substantial amount of effort in manual 3D editing.

Lexicon for classifying ear-canal shapes.

The ear canal is usually described as an S-shaped funnel. In attempting to classify ear-canal shapes obtained from point clouds digitized from molds of 300 ears, the problem of designing criteria for distinguishing and organizing the canal shapes arose. In this work, we extracted features inspired by the S-shape characteristic (critical point, maximum, minimum, twist, writhe, translation, rotation) and, through them, introduced 14 types of ear-canal shapes.

Open versus Closed technique for administration of heated intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC): Morbidity and Mortality outcomes from a high-volume centre.

Background And Aims: Cytoreductive Surgery (CRS) and Hyperthermic Intraperitoneal Chemotherapy (HIPEC) is an established treatment in selected patients with peritoneal metastases, delivered in the UK in specialist centres. HIPEC can be administered via the open coliseum technique as first described by Sugarbaker (O-HIPEC) or using a closed technique (C-HIPEC). Data comparing the safety and outcomes of these different approaches is limited.