Gated residual model significantly reduces error in predicting hearing after cholesteatoma surgery.
Deep multimodal fusion of temporal bone CT and clinical variables for hearing outcomes after cholesteatoma surgery.
Hajime Koyama et al. · NPJ digital medicine · 2026
Purpose
This single-center study developed an automated system for creating regions of interest on temporal bone CT images and three postoperative hearing prediction models, integrating CT images with clinical variables for cholesteatoma surgery, including tympanoplasty with or without mastoidectomy.
Results
average error in predicting hearing after ear surgery, with lower values being better
Tabular
12.75dB
Residual
11.1dB
Gated Residual
9.91dB
More results
Automated creation of a sphere-shaped region of interest without manual annotation achieved a 1.22-mm median center error and a 6.6-mm maximum distance error.
The corresponding areas under the curves for predicting a postoperative air-bone gap of ≤ 20 dB were 0.65,0.69, and 0.71.
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Conclusion
This study provides proof-of-concept evidence that gated residual fusion of preoperative CT and clinical variables may improve preoperative hearing outcome prediction, although external validation and further development of clinically aligned surgical-planning frameworks are required before clinical use.