The objective of the retrospective study was to evaluate the factors associated with hearing preservation after low-dose Gamma Knife radiosurgery (GKS) of vestibular schwannomas performed according to the modern standards. From January 2005 to September 2010, 141 consecutive patients underwent such treatment in Tokyo Women's Medical University. Mean marginal dose was 11.9 Gy (range, 11-12 Gy). ...

BACKGROUND One of the most significant recent advances in cochlear implantation is the implantation of patients with residual hearing. These patients have a downsloping sensorineural hearing loss with poor speech discrimination and perform poorly with standard amplification. Studies using a variety of different electrode designs have demonstrated that it is possible to implant an inner ear and ...

Noise reduction algorithms in hearing aids are crucial to improve speech understanding in background noise for hearing impaired persons. For binaural hearing aids, algorithms that exploit the microphone signals from both the left and the right hearing aid are considered to be promising techniques for noise reduction, because in addition to spectral information spatial information can be exploit...

The likelihood of residual hearing preservation in cochlear implantation (CI) is related to surgical factors such as type of cochleostomy (trans-fenestral vs. promontorial), use of lubricants and protective drugs, and device-related factors such as shape, length and flexibility of the array. We investigated the impact of these factors on the hearing preservation rate in adults and children with...

Patients with vestibular schwannomas (VSs) most commonly present with sensorineural hearing loss, which is often insidious or gradual. Up to 26% of patients may present with sudden hearing loss, however, which poses an important surgical challenge. Sudden hearing loss has been attributed to spasm or occlusion of the labyrinthine artery resulting from tumor compression, and it is usually treated...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the prevalence of hearing loss after concomitant radiochemotherapy in patients enrolled in a larynx preservation protocol. DESIGN Prospective study. SETTING Consecutive patients treated in a tertiary cancer center hospital between 2001 and 2002. PATIENTS Eligible subjects included patients prospectively enrolled in an organ preservation protocol based on concomita...

To introduce a novel surgical approach to petrous apex lesion (PA) with superior semicircular canal plugging for hearing preservation.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the postoperative auditory and facial nerve function results after cerebellopontine angle meningioma removal. DESIGN Retrospective chart review. SETTING Tertiary care referral center. PATIENTS Twenty-one patients undergoing surgical removal of cerebellopontine angle meningiomas by the senior author (R.J.W.). INTERVENTIONS Translabyrinthine or retrosigmoid approa...

Conclusion: Chances of hearing preservation are better in patients with vestibular schwannoma (VS) from the superior vestibular nerve (SVN) than from the inferior vestibular nerve (IVN). Pathologic posturography and electronystagmography (ENG) findings are more common in schwannomas from the SVN compared with tumors from the IVN. In this way, computerized dynamic platform posturography (CDPP) a...