*2.1. Dataset*

A total of 590 patients undergoing various treatments at the Institut Universitaire de la Face et du Cou, Nice, France, from 2008 to 2013 were included in this retrospective study. Preoperative temporal bone CT scans were obtained for each patient, constituting a dataset of 1099 CT images comprising 560 right and 539 left scans. The acquired images were of varying quality, with voxel resolutions ranging from 0.187 × 0.187 × 0.250 to 0.316 × 0.316 × 0.312 mm3. In accordance with the data agreement, EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and local regulations on data privacy and processing, the dataset was fully pseudonymized before further processing. Therefore, the correspondence between the identifying metadata and the pseudonyms used to identify individual datasets was not available, with the exception of patients' sex. Analysis related to patients' demographics such as origin, age, etc., was beyond the scope of this study.
