Seeing Cleft Lip from a New Angle: Crowdsourcing to Determine whether Scar Severity or Lip Angle Matters More to the General Public.

BACKGROUND: Modern cleft lip surgery aims to restore symmetry and create a level, normal-appearing Cupid's bow. However, families' concerns often center on the degree of scarring. The authors hypothesized that the lip angle would be less influential than scar severity in layperson ratings. METHODS: The authors received institutional review board approval for modifying patients' postoperative photographs to create systematic variations displaying different levels of scarring and lip angle. Each child's resulting composite images were presented in pairs to internet raters using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Users selected the simulated postoperative result they felt to be most normal. The Bradley-Terry model was used to determine raters' preferences between different levels of scarring and lip angle. RESULTS: Four children with primary unilateral cleft lip repair had their postoperative photographs modified (mean age, 1.4 years; mean follow-up, 1.0 years). Twelve-hundred crowdsourced pairwise ratings were collected for each patient (4800 combined ratings). For all four children, raters preferred images with more severe scarring than those with a greater lip angle, suggesting uneven lip angle has a more negative effect on perceived appearance. CONCLUSIONS: Online crowdsourcing postoperative lip angle had a significantly greater influence on ratings of normal appearance than does the severity of scarring. Although patients may ask about scars more often, clinically, this study suggests perceptions of a cleft lip repair result may be more likely influenced by the angle of the cleft lip repair.

Defining Ideal External Female Genital Anatomy via Crowdsourcing Analysis.

BACKGROUND: Despite existing anthropometric data in the literature regarding the variation of female external genital anatomy, the ideal aesthetic characteristics have yet to be defined. OBJECTIVES: The authors utilized crowdsourcing to better evaluate preferred anatomic characteristics of external female genitalia. METHODS: Fifty-six total images were digitally created by altering the proportions of the labia minora, labia majora, and clitoral hood. Images with differing ratios were presented in pairs to Amazon Mechanical Turk (Seattle, WA, USA) raters. Three different experiments were performed with each varying 2 of the 3 image characteristics to permit 2-factor modeling. The Bradley-Terry-Luce model was applied to the pairwise comparisons ratings to create a rank order for each image. Preferences for each anatomic variable were compared with chi-squared tests. RESULTS: A total of 5000 raters participated. Experiment 1 compared differing widths of the labia majora and labia minora and determined a significant preference for larger labia majora width and mid-range labia minora width (P = 0.007). Experiment 2 compared labia minora width vs clitoral hood length and showed a statistically significant preference for wider majoras (P < 0.001) but no significant preference in clitoral hood length (P = 0.54). Experiment 3 compared clitoral hood length vs labia minora width and showed a statistically significant preference for mid-range labia minora widths (P < 0.001) but no significant preference in clitoral hood length (P = 0.78). CONCLUSIONS: Raters preferred a labia majora to labia minora width ratio of 3:1 with minimal preference in clitoral hood length.

Transforming assessment of speech in children with cleft palate via online crowdsourcing.

OBJECTIVE: Speech intelligibility is fundamental to social interactions and a critical surgical outcome in patients with cleft palate. Online crowdsourcing is a burgeoning technology, with potential to mitigate the burden of limited accessibility to speech-language-pathologists (SLPs). This pilot study investigates the concordance of online crowdsourced evaluations of hypernasality with SLP ratings of children with cleft palate. METHODS: Six audio-phrases each from children with cleft palate were assessed by online crowdsourcing using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), and compared to SLP's gold-standard hypernasality score on the Pittsburgh Weighted Speech Score (PWSS). Phrases were presented to MTurk crowdsourced lay-raters to assess hypernasality on a Likert scale analogous to the PWSS. The survey included clickable reference audio samples for different levels of hypernasality. RESULTS: 1,088 unique online crowdsourced speech ratings were collected on 16 sentences of 3 children with cleft palate aged 4-8 years, with audio averaging 6.5 years follow-up after cleft palate surgery. Patient 1 crowd-mean was 2.62 (SLP rated 2-3); Patient 2 crowd-mean 2.66 (SLP rated 3); and Patient 3 crowd-mean 1.76 (SLP rated 2). Rounded for consistency with PWSS scale, all patients matched SLP ratings. Different sentences had different accuracies compared to the SLP gold standard scores. CONCLUSION: Online crowdsourced ratings of hypernasal speech in children with cleft palate were concordant with SLP ratings, predicting SLP scores in all 3 patients. This novel technology has potential for translation in clinical speech assessments, and may serve as a valuable screening tool for non-experts to identify children requiring further assessment and intervention by a qualified speech language pathology expert.