Pig as a large animal model for posterior fossa surgery in oto-neurosurgery: A cadaveric study

Abstract

This study proposes a practical model for a new approach to the posterior fossa in common domestic pigs. Several surgical procedures can be simulated in the nonliving pig model, including soft tissue dissection, drilling of temporal bone, dural incision, access to the cerebellopontine angle, exposure of cranial nerves and drilling of the internal auditory canal. The pig model perfectly simulates standard otological and neurosurgical procedures, and we highlight the feasibility of our approach for further experiments in a living pig model with the possibility of reproducing the model for research on cranial nerves in pigs to study their electrophysiological behavior.