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. 2022 Nov 8;12:18508. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-22203-2

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© The Author(s) 2022

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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(a) The surgical approach to left Rosenthal’s Canal (RC) passing through the mastoid bone behind the ear. Note the structures of surgical interest: the facial nerve (FN), the stapes (S) and stapedius muscle (SM) and round window membrane (RW). A surgical trephine is seen penetrating the RW to reach RC located just deep to it. (b) A 4 × 4 dynamic grid was applied to 10 RW membranes and was adjusted to membrane size for each specimen. (c) X denotes those grid units in closest anatomical proximity to RC in which a given penetration had at least an 80% chance of reaching RC (see Supplementary Table 2). (d) Using this data, a heat map was created for optimal targeting of RC behind the RW membrane. Highest probability of targeting the RC was through the superior mid-region of the RW membrane. At A2 and A3, the chance was 90% and 80% respectively. Higher values were noted in C1 and B1 (100%), but this region risks injury to the vestibulo-cochlear artery. *D1 was covered by stapedius muscle and was thus not evaluable. Colour bar at the bottom displays the actual frequencies of successfully targeting the RC.