Asymmetric pulses delivered by a cochlear implant allow a reduction in evoked firing rate and in spatial activation in the guinea pig auditory cortex.

Despite that fact that the cochlear implant (CI) is one of the most successful neuro-prosthetic devices which allows hearing restoration, several aspects still need to be improved. Interactions between stimulating electrodes through current spread occurring within the cochlea drastically limit the number of discriminable frequency channels and thus can ultimately result in poor speech perception. One potential solution relies on the use of new pulse shapes, such as asymmetric pulses, which can potentially reduce the current spread within the cochlea.

What Is the Benefit of Ramped Pulse Shapes for Activating Auditory Cortex Neurons? An Electrophysiological Study in an Animal Model of Cochlear Implant.

In all commercial cochlear implant (CI) devices, the activation of auditory nerve fibers is performed with rectangular pulses that have two phases of opposite polarity. Recently, several papers proposed that ramped pulse shapes could be an alternative shape for efficiently activating auditory nerve fibers. Here, we investigate whether ramped pulse shapes can activate auditory cortex (ACx) neurons in a more efficient way than the classical rectangular pulses.

Investigating of the role of CT scan for cancer patients during the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic.

Introduction: Amidst this current COVID-19 pandemic, we undertook this systematic review to determine the role of medical imaging, with a special emphasis on computed tomography (CT), on guiding the care and management of oncologic patients.

Material And Methods: Study selection focused on articles from 01/02/2020 to 04/23/2020. After removal of irrelevant articles, all systematic or non-systematic reviews, comments, correspondence, editorials, guidelines and meta-analysis and case reports with less than 5 patients were also excluded.

Predicting death or recurrence of portal hypertension symptoms after TIPS procedures.

Background: Accurate prediction of portal hypertension recurrence after transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt (TIPS) placement will improve clinical decision-making.

Purpose: To evaluate if perioperative variables could predict disease-free survival (DFS) in cirrhotic patients with portal hypertension (PHT) treated with TIPS.

Materials And Methods: We recruited 206 cirrhotic patients with PHT treated with TIPS, randomly assigned to training (n = 138) and validation (n = 68) sets.