Deaf people who use cochlear implants show surprisingly poor sensitivity to the temporal fine structure of sounds. One possible reason is that conventional cochlear implants cannot activate selectively the auditory-nerve fibers having low characteristic frequencies (CFs), which, in normal hearing, phase lock to stimulus fine structure. Recently, we tested in animals an alternative mode of audit...

Piston stapes prostheses are implanted in patients with refractory conductive or mixed hearing loss due to stapes otosclerosis to stimulate the perilymph with varying degrees of success. The overclosure effect described by the majority of researchers affects mainly low and medium frequencies, and a large number of patients report a lack of satisfactory results for frequencies above 2 kHz. The m...

A patient who had had sacculotomy with placement of a stainless steel sacculotomy tack 20 years earlier experienced vertigo and auditory sensations during MR imaging. The safety of these prosthesis in MR is questionable. A simple method of determining ferromagnetic interaction is proposed.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the compensatory effects of real-time auditory feedback on two proprioceptively deafferented subjects. The real-time auditory feedback was based on a movement sonification approach, consisting of translating some movement variables into synthetic sounds to make them audible. The two deafferented subjects and 16 age-matched control participants were asked to...

The mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related potential is a non-task related neurophysiologic index of auditory discrimination. The MMN was elicited in eight cochlear implant recipients by the synthesized speech stimulus pair /da/ and /ta/. The response was remarkably similar to the MMN measured in normal-hearing individuals to the same stimuli. The results suggest that the central auditory syst...

Deaf humans implanted with a cochlear prosthesis depend largely on temporal cues for speech recognition because spectral information processing is severely impaired. Training with a cochlear prosthesis is typically required before speech perception shows improvement, suggesting that relevant experience modifies temporal processing in the central auditory system. We tested this hypothesis in neo...

PURPOSE We studied the capabilities of the Argus II retinal prosthesis for guiding fine hand movement, and demonstrated and quantified guidance improvement when using the device over when not using the device for progressively less predictable trajectories. METHODS A total of 21 patients with retinitis pigmentosa (RP), remaining vision no more than bare light perception, and an implanted Argu...

Auditory prostheses, such as cochlear implant and auditory brainstem implant, are used clinically to restore the hearing of patients with sensorineural hearing loss. These devices can considerably improve the auditory information conveyed to the auditory cortex, but proper rehabilitation process is usually necessary to restore auditory communication to an adequate level. Therefore, improvements...