Program of Speech and Hearing Science, College of Health Solutions, Arizona State University, 975 S. Myrtle Av., Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA.
J Assoc Res Otolaryngol. 2022 Dec;23(6):875-887. doi: 10.1007/s10162-022-00876-w. Epub 2022 Nov 3.
Various neural health estimates have been shown to indicate the density of spiral ganglion neurons in animal and modeling studies of cochlear implants (CIs). However, when applied to human CI users, these neural health estimates based on psychophysical and electrophysiological measures are not consistently correlated with each other or with the speech recognition performance. This study investigated whether the neural health estimates have stronger correlations with the temporal and place pitch sensitivity than with the speech recognition performance. On five electrodes in 12 tested ears of eight adult CI users, polarity effect (PE), multipulse integration (MPI), and interphase gap (IPG) effect on the amplitude growth function (AGF) of electrically evoked compound action potential (ECAP) were measured to estimate neural health, while thresholds of amplitude modulation frequency ranking (AMFR) and virtual channel ranking (VCR) were measured to indicate temporal and place pitch sensitivity. AzBio sentence recognition in noise was measured using the clinical CI processor for each ear. The results showed significantly poorer AMFR and VCR thresholds on the basal electrodes than on the apical and middle electrodes. Across ears and electrodes, only the IPG offset effect on ECAP AGF had a nearly significant negative correlation with the VCR threshold after removing the outliers. No significant across-ear correlations were found between the mean neural health estimates, mean pitch-ranking thresholds, and AzBio sentence recognition score. This study suggests that the central axon demyelination reflected by the IPG offset effect may be important for the place pitch sensitivity of CI users and that the IPG offset effect may be used to predict the perceptual resolution of virtual channels for CI programming.
各种神经健康估计值已被证明可指示螺旋神经节神经元在动物和耳蜗植入物(CI)的建模研究中的密度。然而,当将这些基于心理物理学和电生理学测量的神经健康估计值应用于人类 CI 用户时,它们彼此之间以及与言语识别性能并不总是相关的。本研究调查了神经健康估计值与时间和位置音高敏感性的相关性是否强于与言语识别性能的相关性。在 8 位成年 CI 用户的 12 个测试耳的 5 个电极上,测量了极性效应(PE)、多脉冲积分(MPI)和相间间隙(IPG)对电诱发复合动作电位(ECAP)幅度增长函数(AGF)的影响,以估计神经健康,同时测量了幅度调制频率排序(AMFR)和虚拟通道排序(VCR)阈值,以指示时间和位置音高敏感性。使用临床 CI 处理器测量了每个耳朵的 AzBio 句子识别在噪声中的情况。结果表明,基底电极的 AMFR 和 VCR 阈值明显低于顶端和中间电极。在整个耳朵和电极中,仅在去除异常值后,ECAP AGF 的 IPG 偏移效应与 VCR 阈值呈负相关。在平均神经健康估计值、平均音高排序阈值和 AzBio 句子识别得分之间未发现显著的跨耳相关性。本研究表明,IPG 偏移效应反映的中枢轴突脱髓鞘可能对 CI 用户的位置音高敏感性很重要,并且 IPG 偏移效应可用于预测 CI 编程的虚拟通道的感知分辨率。