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How we hear
Published in Karl H.E. Kroemer, Fitting the Human, 2017
Several kinds of surgical implants can help persons with severe hearing loss. Bone-anchored hearing aids work for those with singlesided deafness. A transmitter, attached to the skull on the deaf side, picks up sound and then conducts it to the good side.Middle ear implants can help people with mild to moderate hearing loss. They attach directly to the middle ear bones and amplify sound signals. A component behind the ear houses the microphone, the sound processor, and the battery.Cochlear implants help in the case of severe hearing loss. They convert sound into nerve impulses and send them to the brain. A transmitter is placed under the skin behind the ear, and electrodes are implanted inside the cochlea.
Effect of ossicular chain deformity on reverse stimulation considering the overflow characteristics of third windows
Published in Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering, 2022
Houguang Liu, Lin Xue, Jianhua Yang, Gang Cheng, Lei Zhou, Xinsheng Huang
Hearing loss is one of the most prevalent diseases all over the world. With the growth and aging of the global population, the number of people with hearing loss is increasing rapidly. As the primary type of hearing loss, the sensorineural hearing loss still lacks effective treatment. Most patients can only use hearing aids to compensate for hearing loss (Moore 2007). However, traditional hearing aids have a series of inherent problems such as acoustic feedback, limited high-frequency gain, and ear canal occlusion (Angeli et al. 2005; Hong et al. 2007). Besides, for some patients with ossicular chain deformity (OCD), in which the sound wave cannot transmit efficiently from the tympanic membrane to the cochlea, hearing aids cannot be used to compensate for hearing loss (Colletti et al. 2013). In response to this problem, Colletti et al. (2006) proposed a method of coupling the actuator of the middle ear implant with the round window membrane to treat hearing loss. This application of the middle ear implant is also called reverse stimulation (Stieger et al. 2013), as its sound transmission path in the ear is opposite to that of the normal hearing process, in which the sound is transmitted to the cochlea through the oval window rather than the round window. Under this stimulation, the actuator transmits its vibrational energy directly into the cochlea by stimulating the round window membrane, bypassing the damaged ossicular chain. Clinical results indicate that it can effectively compensate for this kind of hearing loss (Schraven et al. 2012; Maier et al. 2013; Shin et al. 2016). However, its postoperative outcomes show large variations among patients (Sprinzl et al. 2011).