Novel pre-surgical screening for cochlear implant candidates
Abstract
Individuals with normal vision but who suffer from profound hearing loss can benefit from cochlear implants in spoken language comprehension over lip-reading. This benefit can vary significantly across implantees. It is desirable to develop a behavioral test battery that may be used in a pre-surgical setting to identify good/poor implant candidates. Such a test should use only visual or self-reported measures. An existing test is visual-only word identification using lip-reading, but this has not yet been found to be a strong indicator of post-implant benefit. It is hypothesized that cognitive function, particularly executive function, may play a role in this benefit. This study evaluated three mechanisms of assessment to identify the best test battery for word identification performance. Preliminary results suggest that two of visual-only forward/backward discrimination, visual-only word identification, and self-reported executive function testing are sufficient to identify good/poor implant candidates.
Degree
M.S.B.M.E.
Advisors
Talavage, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Biomedical engineering|Surgery
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