| Otitis Media (OM) is a disease that is characterized by inflammation of the Middle Ear (ME) mucosa. This disease is the most frequent reason that children in the US are prescribed antibiotics, accounting for 25% of all prescriptions filled annually. It has been estimated that in the US, an annual health related cost of ∼;Nearly 9.5 million people per year present to their primary care physician with the complaint of nasal obstruction. Of this large group of patients, over 600,000 sinonasal operations are performed annually in the US, and over 260,000 of these procedures are septoplasties. Even with this large number of surgeries performed every year, it has been estimated that septoplasty is only successful in 63–85% of cases. Chapter 6 unveils the details for a novel ‘virtual surgery’ technique to allow for better planned, and personalized surgical interventions for every patient. The approach uses geometries reconstructed from CT images and analyzed with a custom program to perform virtual surgery. The virtual surgery is performed by a surgeon and simulates the same procedures that are to be performed, but provides objective quantification, through the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), of whether or not the intervention will benefit the patient. The program was then used in two case studies which illustrate the true diagnostic benefits of performing personalized surgeries. |
