Cochlear implants are the first example of a neural prosthesis that can substitute a sensory organ: they bypass the malfunctioning auditory periphery of profoundly-deaf people to electrically stimulate their auditory nerve. The history of cochlear implants dates back to 1957, when Djourno and Eyriès managed, for the first time, to elicit sound sensations in a deaf listener using an electrode im...

A combination of electrophysiological mapping, behavioral analysis and cortical micro-stimulation was used to explore the interrelation between the auditory cortex and behavior in the adult rat. Auditory discriminations were evaluated in eight rats trained to discriminate the presence or absence of a 75 dB pure tone stimulus. A probe trial technique was used to obtain intensity generalization g...

Cochlear implant electrical stimulation of the auditory system to rehabilitate deafness has been remarkably successful. Its deployment requires both an intact auditory nerve and a suitably patent cochlear lumen. When disease renders prerequisite conditions impassable, such as in neurofibromatosis type II and cochlear obliterans, alternative treatment targets are considered. Electrical stimulati...

Imp fan ta ble prostheses designed to deliver electrical stim u li directly to the auditory nerve hold considerable promise for people with a type * o f deafness in which the sensory hair cells of the inner ear are damaged

UNLABELLED Otosclerosis causes the fixation of the stapes and conductive hearing loss, usually corrected with the use of hearing aids or through stapedotomy and the replacement of the involved stapes with a prosthesis. Titanium has been the most recently used material of choice in stapedotomy prostheses. Only two prostheses are commercially available in Brazil. There are no reports in the liter...

Speech discrimination testing was carried out under clinical trial conditions for eight profoundly postlingually deaf adults to assess the efficacy of a newly developed 22-channel cochlear prosthesis and speech processor. Three months postoperatively, these patients showed significantly better results with the cochlear prosthesis than for preoperative testing with a conventional hearing aid or ...

A primary cause of deafness is damage of receptor cells in the inner ear. Clinically, it has been demonstrated that effective functionality can be provided by electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve, thus bypassing damaged receptor cells. However, subsequent to sensory cell loss there is a secondary degeneration of the afferent nerve fibers, resulting in reduced effectiveness of such cochl...

Human middle-ear is the key component of the auditory system. Its function is to transfer the sound waves through the ear canal to provide sufficient stimulus to the fluids of the inner ear. Degradation of the ossicles that transmit these sound waves from the eardrum to the inner ear leads to hearing loss. This problem can be overcome by replacing one or more of these ossicles by middleear pros...