Expensive today but cheaper tomorrow: lifetime costs of an active middle ear implant compared to alternative treatment options.

Background: When choosing between different treatment options, implants often appear too costly. However, this perspective does not take future costs into account. This article evaluates lifetime costs for different surgical interventions to treat hearing loss.

Virtual cochlear implantation for personalized rehabilitation of profound hearing loss.

In cochlear implantation, current preoperative planning procedures allow for estimating how far a specific implant will reach into the inner ear of the patient, which is important to optimize hearing preservation and speech perception outcomes. Here we report on the development of a methodology that goes beyond current planning approaches: the proposed model does not only estimate specific outcome parameters but allows for entire, three-dimensional virtual implantations of patient-specific cochlear anatomies with different types of electrode arrays. The model was trained based on imaging datasets of 186 human cochleae, which contained 171 clinical computer tomographies (CTs) of actual cochlear implant patients as well as 15 high-resolution micro-CTs of cadaver cochleae to also reconstruct the refined intracochlear structures not visible in clinical imaging.

Development and validation of the audio processor satisfaction questionnaire (APSQ) for hearing implant users.

The satisfaction experienced with using an audio processor is very important to hearing implant system users. Currently there are no measures that can be used to assess user satisfaction with an audio processor. This study aims to develop and validate a specific and standardised questionnaire that focuses on user satisfaction with their audio processor.

Introducing real-life listening features into the clinical test environment: Part II: Measuring the hearing performance and evaluating the listening effort of individuals with a hearing implant.

The controlled clinical test environment is very different from real-life listening situations, where the presence of additional speakers and variations in background noise signals can affect listening performances. The primary objective of this study is to reduce the gap between clinical results and real-life performances that are reported for many hearing implant users. Similar to Part I of this study, hearing performance and sound perception are evaluated using the following tests: (i) the Roving Level Test, (ii) the Just Understanding Speech Test, (iii) the Performance Perceptual Test, (iv) the Visual Analogue Scale to evaluate the perceived listening effort required for a range of background noise levels, and (v) the Hearing Implant Sound Quality questionnaire.

A Novel Method for Clinical Cochlear Duct Length Estimation toward Patient-Specific Cochlear Implant Selection.

Objective: In the field of cochlear implantation, the current trend toward patient-specific electrode selection and the achievement of optimal audiologic outcomes has resulted in implant manufacturers developing a large portfolio of electrodes. The aim of this study was to bridge the gap between the known variability of cochlea length and this electrode portfolio.

Design: Retrospective analysis on cochlear length and shape in micro-computed tomography and cone beam computed tomography data.

Analysis of Different Approaches for Clinical Cochlear Coverage Evaluation After Cochlear Implantation.

Hypothesis: Methods for cochlear coverage determination vary in their accuracy and are hence not equally reliable.

Background: The audiological outcome after cochlear implantation is known to depend on several factors. One factor shown to positively correlate with speech perception is the insertion angle.

Do you hear the noise? The German matrix sentence test with a fixed noise level in subjects with normal hearing and hearing impairment.

Objective: The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between hearing loss and speech reception threshold (SRT) in a fixed noise condition using the German Oldenburg sentence test (OLSA).

Design: After training with two easily-audible lists of the OLSA, SRTs were determined monaurally with headphones at a fixed noise level of 65 dB SPL using a standard adaptive procedure, converging to 50% speech intelligibility.

Study Sample: Data was obtained from 315 ears of 177 subjects with hearing losses ranging from -5 to 90 dB HL pure-tone average (PTA, 0.