More than 60,000 people worldwide use cochlear implants as a means to restore functional hearing. Although individual performance variability is still high, an average implant user can talk on the phone in a quiet environment. Cochlear-implant research has also matured as a field, as evidenced by the exponential growth in both the patient population and scientific publication. The present repor...

Cochlear implantation has become an increasingly common procedure in the rehabilitation of selected cases of profound deafness.' Patients should have profound total bilateral sensorineural hearing loss. Sound is transformed into small electric currents which stimulate the auditory nerves in the cochlea and generate the hearing sensation. The nucleus cochlear implant is the result of more t...

What information do we need to know about listeners to predict their performance on a speech intelligibility task and how well can we predict intelligibility anyway? This paper performs a meta-analysis on two speech intelligibility studies of hearing-impaired listeners in which we evaluate different approaches to building a predictive model of intelligibility. The model has two components: a co...

For decades, we have presumed the death of hair cells and spiral ganglion neurons are the main cause of hearing loss and difficulties understanding speech in noise, but new findings suggest synapse loss may be the key contributor. Specifically, recent preclinical studies suggest that the synapses between inner hair cells and spiral ganglion neurons with low spontaneous rates and high thresholds...

OBJECTIVE This study was designed to test the hypothesis that partial hearing conservation is attainable after cochlear implantation with a long perimodiolar electrode. Surgical strategies for hearing conservation during cochlear implantation are described. STUDY DESIGN Prospective, single-subject, repeated-measures design. SETTING Academic tertiary care center. PATIENTS Twenty-eight seve...

Distortion product otoacoustic emission (DPOAE) growth functions reflect the active nonlinear cochlear sound processing when using a primary-tone setting which accounts for the different compressions of the two primaries at the DPOAE generation site and hence provide a measure for objectively assessing cochlear sensitivity and compression. DPOAE thresholds can be derived from extrapolated DPOAE...

Recent studies in normal-hearing listeners have used envelope-vocoded stimuli to show that the masking of speech by noise is dominated by the temporal-envelope fluctuations inherent in noise, rather than just overall power. Because these studies were based on vocoding, it was expected that cochlear-implant (CI) users would demonstrate a similar sensitivity to inherent fluctuations. In contrast,...

BACKGROUND Hearing Preservation is becoming increasingly important in cochlear implantation as there is growing evidence that preserving the residual hearing, especially in the low frequencies in combination with the electric stimulation can significantly improve hearing and speech outcomes in noise. Besides the ongoing development of atraumatic implant electrodes and insertion techniques, the ...