FIG. 2.

Lateral-to-medial view of the thickness map of the TM, with its annulus almost parallel to the page. On the left are four 20-μm-thick serial histological sections from a 3-week-old infant from which the thicknesses of the TM were derived for the finite-element model shown on the right. The positions of the TM in the histological images are indicated by ellipses, with lines connecting them to dark blue bands whose widths indicate the derived cross-sectional thicknesses of the TM model. The anatomical abbreviations are same as those of Figure 1. The cutting plane in the histological images are not in the thickness direction, but are oblique. The actual thickness of the TM was measured in the reconstructed geometry, perpendicular to the TM surface at multiple points.