Patients

Patients/Subjects

The cochlear implant is the only medical intervention that can restore partial hearing in cases of profound sensorineural deafness. As of 1999, nearly 30,000 people, including more than 10,000 children, have received and benefited from cochlear implants. The cochlear implant has evolved from earlier single-channel devices providing mostly help in lipreading to modern multi-channel devices incorporating advanced signal-processing strategies that allow significant open-set speech recognition (Fig. 1 shows results of a meta analysis of sentence recognition in various cochlear implants). Because of these advances, National Institutes of Health sponsored a consensus conference in cochlear implants in 1995, and recommended lowering the audiological criteria for implantation from profound hearing loss (>90 dB HL) to severe hearing loss (>70 dB HL) with less than 30% open-set speech recognition via an appropriately-fitted hearing aid.

There are currently five cochlear implant manufacturers including AllHear, Inc. (AllHear), Advanced Bionics Corporation (Clarion), Cochlear Corporation (Nucleus), MED-DL (Cambi), and MXM Lab (Digisonic). Many laboratories in the world conducted both basic and clinical research in cochlear implants. Acoustic simulations of cochlear implants have been developed to allow not only normal-hearing listeners to appreciate the amount of information transmitted through cochlear implants, but also to serve a powerful research tool to address how the brain recognize speech in both normal and impaired auditory systems. The latest development in cochlear implant research can be found in the biennial Conference for Implantable Auditory Prostheses. Other issues such as deaf culture and cochlear implants are sometimes discussed on the National Association of the Deaf web site.

Click here to view a cochlear implant surgery that was performed live over the Internet from Tampa General Hospital on July 26, 2007!!!

The Sound of Hope, UCI Health: The Fall 2006 edition addresses the technology of cochlear implants!

June 2006- Helen Cullington from the HESP lab competed in the Southern California Spelling Bee. Helen was one of the last 6 people standing playing for the John Tracy Clinic. (picture top left)