Although the diagnostic rate of organizing hematoma has increased, any crucial characteristic findings are not fully understood and elucidated. Even though it is a non-neoplastic lesion, radiological image findings can range from a benign expansile appearance to a more aggressive form such as bony erosion, which sometimes can make any confusion. Thus, clinician should make a diagnosis thoroughly based on the histopathologic finding. Here, we presented two cases of organizing hematoma of the maxillary sinus mimicking chronic rhinosinusitis.

Visual place recognition is widely researched area in robotics, as it is one of the elemental requirements for autonomous navigation, simultaneous localization and mapping for mobile robots. However, place recognition in changing environment is a challenging problem since a same place look different according to the time, weather, and seasons. This paper presents a feature extraction method using a deep convolutional auto-encoder to recognize places under severe appearance changes. Given database and query image sequences from different environments, the convolutional auto-encoder is trained to predict the images of the desired environment. The training process is performed by minimizing the loss function between the predicted image and the desired image. After finishing the training process, the encoding part of the structure transforms an input image to a low dimensional latent representation, and it can be used as a condition-invariant feature for recognizing places in changing environment. Experiments were conducted to prove the effective of the proposed method, and the results showed that our method outperformed than existing methods.

Surgery for thyroid disease is becoming much more common, but in some specialized institutions, ENT surgeons have difficulty obtaining experience of parathyroid surgery. Parathyroid disease can be divided into parathyroid adenoma with hyperparathyroidism and secondary hyperparathyroidism due to chronic kidney disease. Parathyroid adenoma with hyperparathyroidism is the most common cause of hypercalcemia and usually presents as nonspecific symptoms, such as, general weakness, osteoporosis, gastrointestinal disorder, kidney stones, and/or neurological symptoms, and thus, diagnosis is often delayed. Patients with secondary hyperparathyroidism due to chronic kidney disease require parathyroidectomy 10 years after the onset of dialysis in 6-10% of cases even when continuously treated in a nephrology department. Here, the authors share their experiences of parathyroid surgery.

Idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss (ISSNHL) is an emergent disease in otologic field. Audiometric follow-up in patients with ISSNHL is important to assess the benefit of treatment and guide initiation of salvage treatment. However, there have been no report to guide the timing of follow-up. The objective of this study was to compare the recovery duration of patients who diagnosed as ISSNHL in each age group. A total of 150 subjects were included in this study and reviewed the medical and audiological records. According to ages, the subjects were classified into four groups; 0-19, 20-39, 40-59 years old and more than 60 years old. The period of time to final hearing levels was compared based on Siegel’s criteria. The period of time to final hearing levels was significantly different in patients with complete recovery based on Siegel’s criteria. 20-39 group (10.3 days) showed faster recovery than 0-19 (18 days), 40-59 (15 days) and ≥60 groups (23.4 days). The period of time to final hearing levels was not significantly different in patients with partial and slight recovery. Young adults with ISSNHL appear to recover faster than other age groups with ISSNHL. The result suggests that children and the elderly with ISSNHL need longer follow-up for hearing and young adults with refractory ISSNHL need earlier initiation of salvage treatment.

Ranula refers to mucous retention cyst or mucocele that develops on the oral floor and it appears most frequently among oral masses derived from salivary glands. Ranula that is extended into submandibular space or into other cervical spaces due to defective mylohyoid muscle is particularly called plunging ranula. Various types of treatments have been conducted for ranula: surgical treatments such as simple excision, marsupialization, and removal of sublingual gland; and sclerotherapy utilizing OK-432 (Picibanil) are being reported. We performed concurrent excision of ranula and sublingual gland through intraoral approach. This technique leaves no post-surgical scars and shows very low recurrence rate and incidence rate of complications. Therefore, in this study, we would like to analyze the treatment methods and results of our patients.