Application of psychoacoustic test in late reimplantation with wide cochlear coverage

Cochlear implants have been used since the 1980s with great success in rehabilitation of patients with severe to profound hearing loss, unilateral or bilateral. Due to technical defect, medical conditions, worsening of speech understanding performance or desire for upgrade, some of these devices currently need to be replaced.

For the reimplantation process, some tests are clinically necessary to qualify and quantify the patient's hearing condition, such as audiometric thresholds and speech perception tests. Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) means analysing the distance between the given stimuli and the response of proximity between values ??- different or similar stimuli. The analysis of this information determines its correspondence with other characteristics of the perceived sound stimulus, for example physical or psychophysical.

Objective This study compared the hearing performance of patients pre- and post-reimplantation through psychoacoustic tests.

Methods Congenital deafened patients, implanted in childhood and reimplanted with enlarged cochlear coverage, were examined. The patients received longer electrodes that provided full coverage of the previously implanted cochlear area (deep insertion), as well as the basal area that was not previously covered by electrodes. Additional to the cochlear implant fitting process, MDS tests were applied to all patients, pre and post reimplantation.

Results Initial results show that preoperatively patients tended to notice that tones differed from others only in one perceptive dimension (eg, "pitch" or "clarity" of sound). In the short-term postoperative period, by cochlear implant first fitting, the responses to the same tests were less consistent. The study proceeds with the evaluation of a larger number of patients.

Poster-PDF A-1557.PDF

Publication History

Article published online:
10 June 2020