The New Auditory Midbrain Implant – Second Clinical Trial

Introduction:

During 2006 – 2008, five deaf patients were implanted at Hannover Medical School (MHH) with a novel hearing prosthesis within the inferior colliculus (IC), known as the single-shank auditory midbrain implant (AMI). It has a straight array of 22 sites (by Cochlear Limited) and was developed as an alternative to the auditory brainstem implant (ABI) for people especially with Neurofibromatosis 2 (NF2) who have no intact hearing nerve and where a cochlear implant is ineffective. However, hearing performance for the five AMI patients consisted mainly of improvements in lip-reading similar to that of ABI patients with NF2.

Methods:

Further animal and human studies showed that the limited hearing performance was likely related to suppressive effects in the IC induced by temporal stimulation patterns when presented on a single-shank array. Therefore, a new AMI having two shanks in parallel was developed (11 sites along each shank) and is going to be implanted in five patients in a second clinical trial at MHH funded by National Institutes of Health (U01DC013030). Different clinical tests will be performed for example pitch ranking or scaling, with the goal to develop a better stimulation strategy that improves speech performance.

Results:

In 2017 the first patient was implanted without complications, the implant is running well, and we got initial data so far.

Conclusions:

It could be shown a safe implantation of a two-shank AMI and that we could collect first data. Nevertheless, further testing is needed to collect more data though.

Publication History

Publication Date:
18 April 2018 (online)