Understanding the biomechanics of the human middle ear remains a challenge, primarily due to the auditory ossicles’ size, its location in the temporal bone, and subtle movements. In a recent study, dynamic synchrotron-based x-ray microtomography has been used on acoustically stimulated intact human ears, allowing the three-dimensional visualization of the ossicular chain in intact human ears for the first time. The implementation of a dedicated analysis pipeline has demonstrated the ability to resolve fast micromotions at 128Hz for two acoustic stimuli (110 and 120dB Sound Pressure Level (SPL)) on fresh-frozen human temporal bones. Measuring at lower sound pressure levels is challenging, because the ossicular vibrations become smaller, and the spatial resolution limit of the current detection system is reached. Increasing the spatial resolution without compromising the image quality or the temporal resolution would significantly extend the dynamic imaging capabilities. Here, a comparative study is conducted for a stimulation frequency of 128Hz at 120dB SPL between two synchrotron-based x-ray magnification setups: a 4x high NA macroscope (pixel size 2.75μm) versus a x10 high NA microscope (pixel size 1.1μm) in combination with the GigaFRoST fast read-out detector. It shows that an increase in resolution can indeed improve the detection of the micromovements, at the compromise of a more limited field of view.
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