Cochlear implant surgery allows surgeons to restore partial hearing to patients suffering from severe hearing loss due to damaged neuroepithelial (hair) cells. During this surgery surgeons insert long, thin, and flimsy electrodes into the scala tympani inside cochlea. Our goal is to develop a robotic system to help surgeons achieve atraumatic cochlear implant surgery using novel steerable cochl...

BACKGROUND Children with multiple disabilities account for a small percentage of implantees in a cochlear implant program, but they remain the most challenging group for which to predict benefit from the implant and for cooperation with habilitation postoperatively. PURPOSE To assess the relationship of pre-implant functional disabilities with postoperative speech perception scores and determ...

PURPOSE The authors assessed whether (a) a full-insertion cochlear implant would provide a higher level of speech understanding than bilateral low-frequency acoustic hearing, (b) contralateral acoustic hearing would add to the speech understanding provided by the implant, and (c) the level of performance achieved with electric stimulation plus contralateral acoustic hearing would be similar to ...

PURPOSE The authors examined the benefits of younger cochlear implantation, longer cochlear implant use, and greater pre-implant aided hearing to spoken language at 3.5 and 4.5 years of age. METHOD Language samples were obtained at ages 3.5 and 4.5 years from 76 children who received an implant by their 3rd birthday. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to identify characteristics associated...

Introduction  A cochlear implant in adolescent patients with pre-lingual deafness is still a debatable issue. Objective  The objective of this study is to analyze and compare the development of auditory speech perception in children with pre-lingual auditory impairment submitted to cochlear implant, in different age groups in the first year after implantation. Method  This is a retrospective st...

Unilateral hearing in childhood restricts input along the bilateral auditory pathways, possibly causing permanent reorganization. In this study we asked: (i) do the auditory pathways develop abnormally in children who are bilaterally deaf and hear with a unilateral cochlear implant? and (ii) can such differences be reversed by restoring input to the deprived ear? We measured multichannel electr...

OBJECTIVE To compare the communication outcomes between children with aided residual hearing and children with cochlear implants. DESIGN Measures of speech recognition and language were administered to pediatric hearing aid users and cochlear implant users followed up longitudinally as part of an ongoing investigation on cochlear implant outcomes. The speech recognition measures included the ...