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  • Inside the Operating Room: Watch Ear Surgery Revision to Correct Flattened Ears
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Hi, this is Dr. Young. We are doing otoplasty today and I'm just going to explain what our plan is. This particular patient's ears were actually operated on before and essentially what happened is they brought the ears too close together and didn't actually bend the ears at the top. The whole ear was actually set back too far towards her face and it looks really flat when you look at her from the front. This was done by a previous surgeon somewhere else.

Our plan is actually to actually elevate the ear away from the head, so it can be seen better, and we also plan to bend this backwards because right now how it looks the ear is pushed too close to the ear and this part sticks out. When we actually lift the ear up, this may come out a little too much, so we're probably going to set this back by making the superior crus of the antihelix more shaped like that with the addition of making the ear come out.

How we're going to do that is, over here, we're going to take these medform blocks and we're going to use this as the projecting element that we're going to use to project the ear out a little bit more. We're going to shape this by cutting it in half and we're going to carve it to fit the exact dimensions that we need to bring the ear outwards. We're going to take that shaped and put it in this area to bring the ear out. And then we're going to use sutures to bend back this ear, so it has pretty much an equal distance from here to here away from the head. We're going to show you, a little bit later on, on the specifics. Thank you.

Hi, we're continuing otoplasty and my discussion on how we're treating this particular patient's situation. When you look over here, as I mentioned before, we are going to make the ear come out. Earlier we showed you the block of medform that was just a big block. This is my construction of a new, basically conchal bowl or segment of a medform that is going to help me push the ear out right where this concha, this is called the concha, and this is the cymba, the cavum portion of the concha. This is going to go right in here like that to push out the ear to a degree.

Now again this was a previous surgery done at a different surgeon's office and she didn't like how it was too close to her head. The other options would have been cartilage but likely the amount of cartilage that you would need would be probably necessitated with cartilage graft and we kind of avoided that by using medform. I've carved this already.

Now the next step is for me to put it in this little pocket underneath her ear. I've already checked from the anterior view how it looks in terms of the projection. What we're gonna do is close this over here and then do a very, very slight fold on this side. I'm gonna check it continually on the frontal view on the front side of her to see how it looks. Right now I'm just gonna close this ... piece in there. What I'm gonna do is use the, because it's an implant, I want to cover it as much as possible. What we're gonna do is take some muscle in the back and try to cover the sides of it. This will have cartilage on this side to protect the implant but I'll need some around it in order to protect the implant so it's not against skin completely. So that's our next step. After we close, after we put the muscle graft around it, we're going to close it and then we're going to try to re-bend it to match the picture that she desired. Thank you.

Inside the Operating Room: Watch Ear Surgery Revision to Correct Flattened Ears

Dr. Philip Young performs an otoplasty revision, or the correction of a previous ear surgery that resulted in ears that were pinned too close to the patient's head.