Text

Cochlear implants (CIs) are considered one of the most successful neural prostheses. Today, more than 1,000,000 severely-to-profoundly deaf individuals have received a CI to restore some of their hearing. However, the performance of individual users varies largely. While some patients experience a notable improvement in functional hearing, others receive little benefit from CIs. Some situations, such as noisy listening environments, tonal languages, and music perception, remain challenging for all users. Reducing interactions between neighboring CI electrode contacts and increasing the number of independent stimulation channels can improve CI performance. While reducing the interaction of adjacent channels during electrical stimulation is challenging, neural stimulation with light might be a novel approach to evoke responses from small populations of neurons. Optical radiation can be delivered more selectively to groups of target neurons. It is anticipated that neural prostheses with enhanced neural fidelity can be developed by using optical stimulation. Two methods for optical stimulation are currently under investigation, optogenetics (OG) and infrared neural stimulation (INS). In the presentation, the efforts and advances that led to the prototype of a novel cochlear implant incorporating electrical and optical stimulation will be shown and discussed.

Funded through the NIH by grants R56DC017492 and R01DC018666 at Northwestern University.