Simulation study of cochlear implants stimulation protocols and its application to surgical planning

Abstract

Hearing impairment is one of the most common causes of disability worldwide, present both in adults and newborns. The treatments are costly and invasive, hence lot of effort in research is done towards cost effectiveness and minimally invasive surgery. In the specific case of sensorineural hearing loss (SHL), which is caused by deficiencies inside the cochlea, usually cochlear implantation is recommended when the hearing loss is too severe even it implies invasive surgery. Even so, the/noutcome of the cochlear implant performance highly varies between patients due to the wide range of cochlear anatomies and the level of hearing impairment. In this work we study the effects of cochlear implants through computational modelling and finite/nelement simulations. The use of a computational model allows to predict pre-operatively the parameters that better adapt a specific patient case such as the insertion depth, the total current emitted and the implant model. In order to do so, three different types of implant protocols are studied: monopolar, bipolar and tripolar. In this project the computational simulations have proven to be useful to better understand the behavior of the implanted cochleas. In addition, a validation study has been carried out in order to demonstrate the feasibility of this work and to compare the results obtained with the literature. This work is in the context of the European Project HEAR-EU (FP7, 2007-2013) under grant agreement 304857, and the work presented hereby has been applied in it.