Comparison between effects of various partial inferior turbinectomy options on nasal airflow: a computer simulation study

Abstract

Partial inferior turbinectomy is typically performed on patients suffering from chronic nasal obstruction due to hypertrophy of inferior turbinates and is refractory to other more conservative treatments. The effects of the various options of incision performed on the inferior turbinate in terms of the resulting nasal airflow pattern are examined using computational fluid mechanics. The pressure drops across the severely blocked nose and healthy nose models were found to be 32.3 and 12.3 Pa, respectively, whereas the pressure drops across the nasal cavity following one-third turbinate resection, total turbinate resection and front-end resection were obtained as 5.8, 6.1 and 30.5 Pa correspondingly. Based on the total pressure drop results, the one-third resection option seems to be better than the front-end surgery and the total turbinate resection.

Keywords:

• nasal cavity
• inferior turbinates
• nasal airflow
• turbinectomy
• computational fluid mechanics

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance by Chiet Sing Chong and Hee Joo Poh from the Institute of High Performance Computing for the image segmentation and the setting up of the models. The authors would also like to acknowledge the financial support of cross-faculty research grant from the National University of Singapore and Academic Research Grant from the Ministry of Education, Singapore.