Evidence-Based Diagnosis and Management of Facial Nerve Disorders

Dear Colleagues,

With increasing speed, new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for the management of facial nerve disorders are being published. Many of them have improved decision making, pharmacological and surgical treatment, and the rehabilitation of patients. Unfortunately,  there is often a lack of high-quality studies that prove long-term effect or identify subgroups that are of particular benefit. Even a reliable characterization of patients with facial nerve disabilities is often complicated. Therefore, evidence-based management remains challenging.  

Novel clinical and technological solutions, such as Patient-Related Outcome Measures (PROMs), telemedicine, 3D motion-capture systems, multi-channel electromyography, ultrasonographic and magnetic resonance imaging, app-based patient follow-up, big-data analysis and machine learning, practice guidelines, or classification based on decision trees, among others, as well as basic research to better understand the pathomechanism might not only enhance our knowledge about impacts of facial nerve disorders, ability to characterize patients, and interventional effects, but might also pave the way towards more evidence-based paradigms.

Therefore, this Special Issue aims to provide an overview of the clinical and technological applications which hold promise to improve diagnosis, clinical characterization, therorecial understanding, and treatment of facial nerve disabilities.

Dr. Gerd Fabian Volk
Prof. Dr. Steffen U. Eisenhardt
Prof. Dr. Shai M. Rozen
Guest Editors

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