A new postoperative adjustable prosthesis for ossicular chain reconstructions

The tympanoplasty-III is a widely used method to heal the conductive hearing loss by reconstructing the ossicular chain with passive middle ear prostheses. One of the major challenges during this procedure is to determine the correct prosthesis length intraoperatively, which specifies the tension on the tissues. A suboptimal tension on the tissues may decrease the sound conduction, cause prosthesis luxation and even injure the tympanic membrane or inner ear. Furthermore, the tissue deformations after the operation and variations in the ambient pressure may cause the same problems even if the prosthesis length was set correctly during the operation. However, the state of the art prostheses can only be adjusted during the operation and they cannot adapt themselves after the operation. In this paper, we present a new middle ear prosthesis that can adapt its length to changes occurring after the operation such as tissue swelling or unbalanced middle ear pressure.