gms | German Medical Science

The stimulation of the auditory cortex (AC) is of outmost importance for the development of language and communication skills. Hence, in patients with a cochlear implant (CI), especially in young children and infants (prelingual deafness), it is essential to check the activation of the AC. This can either be done by indirect measures like a hearing test or by direct measures like electroencephalography (EEG). When it comes to infants and young children the verification of activation in the AC is rather difficult. To measure EEG they have to keep very quiet or they need to be narcotized. Other objective measures like telemetric evoked compound action potential recordings assess auditory nerve function, but not AC activity. With subjective measures like a hearing test only the child’s behavior and its reaction to a sound can be observed. Accordingly, a reliable method for the verification of AC activation in infants is needed. The main goal of this project is to establish a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)-based evaluation of activity in the AC before and after the implantation of a CI in infants. To acquire this aim the activity in the AC measured with fNIRS will be related to specific neural, audiometric and behavioral measures. Thereby, this study will help to get a better understanding of the pre- and postoperative factors affecting the individual outcome with a CI. Besides a working stimulation of the auditory nerve and the AC, there are also other factors that seem to impact the outcome of a CI, like the degree of cross-modal reorganization in the auditory cortex (Sandmann et al., 2012).Therefore, another goal is to get new insides into plasticity using a combination of EEG and fNIRS.

Unterstützt durch: This work was supported by the DFG Cluster of Excellence EXC 1077/1 “Hearing4all”.

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