Auditory Stem Implant for a New Zealand Child

Jorja Steele became the first child to receive an auditory stem implant in Australia, after cochlear implants provided no benefit. She is from New Zealand.

Neurosurgeons from three Melbourne hospitals, aided by a team of audiologists, implanted the device - a three-by-six-millimetres pad of electrodes that stimulates hearing pathways in the brain - during a four-hour operation.

Nucleus 22 and 24 Users Needed for Study

Brian Kelly, a graduate of Syracuse University in biomedical engineering, and a bilateral cochlear implant user is seeking subjects for his research project.

He's looking for adult research subjects who have had cochlear implants for at least six months and are using a Nucleus-22 or Nucleus-24 device. Subjects will participate in various experiments that study sound perception "in order to help us better understand how implants interact with the brain to encode sound, and how to improve implant functioning,"

Cochlear Corporation Labor Dispute

Cochlear Corporation is involved in a labor dispute with the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union at its Sydney manufacturing facility.

Neuroplasticity and Cochlear Implants

Researchers have found that cochlear implants may support the restoration of the brain's auditory pathways even after many years of deafness.

The results imply that the brain can reorganize sound processing centers or press into service latent ones based on sound stimulation. Jeanne Guiraud, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Lyon, Edouard Herriot University Hospital, and Advanced Bionics, a firm that makes cochlear implants, worked with deaf subjects from 16 to 74 years old and found that younger subjects and those with a shorter history of deafness showed changes that mirrored patterns in people with normal hearing more closely.

"The results imply a restoration to some extent of the normal organization through the use of the cochlear implant," says Manuel Don, PhD, of the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles. "They also claim to find ties between the degree of restored organization and a hearing task. Such ties are of enormous importance in evaluating cochlear implant benefits."