BII Seminar: Cortical Activity in Bilateral Cochlear Implant Recipients
27 Mar 2012
Wednesday 25 April 2012 (1.30pm, with lunch from 1pm) in Room 1.009, Roscoe Building.
Speakers: Kevin Green, Julian Matthews
Cochlear implants are a well accepted technique for the management of profound sensory hearing loss. While outcomes from implantation tend to be good, up to 15% of cochlear implant recipients get poor speech perception with no clinical reason apparent. Some of this poor performance may be due to factors within the auditory cortices. Study of how the brain adapts to the reintroduction of auditory input via cochlear implants may ultimately allow clinicians to predict which patients will get suboptimal outcomes from implantation. This would permit more accurate counselling of prospective implant candidates and potentially more focussed rehabilitation for those predicted to get poorer outcomes.
Our short term aims are to compare cortical activations in normal hearing and cochlear implant recipients and then study specific subgroups of implant users. Our longer term aims are to develop functional neuroimaging techniques that can be used as part of the cochlear implant assessment process to aid prediction of likely outcomes on an individual patient basis.
In this presentation, cochlear implantation will be discussed to provide background information to the PET investigation of cochlear implant recipients. The findings of our study that compared the cortical changes observed in patients with bilateral cochlear implants and normal hearing controls will be discussed in greater detail.
Kevin Green is a consultant ENT surgeon based at Manchester Royal Infirmary and specialises in the implantation of auditory devices for the rehabilitation of deafness. His main areas of research are hearing loss and its rehabilitation and the application of functional neuroimaging techniques in deaf patients both before and after cochlear implantation.
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