Funding tool: Basic research projects
Project-ID: LS14-027
Project start: 01. Februar 2016
Project end: will follow
Runtime: 36 months / finished
Funding amount: € 221.000,00

Brief summary:

Severe hearing loss or deafness, affecting 1,7 % of the people, result in withdrawal from social life, incapacitation for work and promote early dementia. Hearing aids and cochlea implants (CI) provide help, but cannot fully remediate the socioeconomic losses. The physiological reason is an outage of the so called “cocktail party capacity”, which empowers normal hearing people to mask out ambient noise and to focus to a single speaker inmidst a babble of voices. This special signal processing is not a process of the cerebrum alone but the cortex controls filtering down to the cochlea via efferent, cascaded feedback loops. Despite of elaborate signal processing strategies (which have to be manually selected by the patient’s remote control), Hearing Aids and CI cannot cope with the unconscious mechanisms of the efferent auditory pathway: The closure of the feedback loop over cochlea, cortex and hearing aid/CI is lacking.
As a vision, brain computer interfaces (BCI) could connect the cortex or underlying stages of the auditory efference to hearing aids/CI. Its implementation would need cooperation between audiologists, neurosurgeons, electrophysiologists, electrode developers and neurocomputational experts. As it would take at least a decade, it should be implemented by means of a roadmap, which pools knowledge and gains acceptance due to international peers involved together with all industry in a pre-competitive basis. The university clinic St. Pölten (UKKStP) with its recent acquisition of a leading ORL expert in collaboration with the graduate program “neuro-rehabilitation” at newly founded Karl Landsteiner University are predestined to take a leading role in the definition of challenges and mile stones of this roadmap.
Beneath this longterm preparation, small initiating experiments shall prove, that the closure of the efferent auditory loop may really work in the future. Within the framework of ongoing animal experiments and the collaboration of patients newly provided with CI some less difficult access to the efferent auditory system will be examined like Compound Action Potentials CAP, action potentials in tonotopy via the sensing mode of CI and EEG recordings. This shall be performed between UKStP and MHH via exchange of young researchers transferring of methods and techniques.
Given success, an experimental closure of the efferent feedback loop could be investigated within a CI research environment. An efferent patient’s brain control of hearing processors might appear by self-organization similarly to the observations made with sensomotory BCI control of robot arms*.
Roadmap, international network and first experimental work as described above together with material science and neurosurgical studies at CEST and UKI will enable to turn in an EU Coordinative Action grant as a final platform for long-term research on closing the efferent loop in cooperation with industry.
*Collinger JL et al, J. Clin. Trans. Science (2014) 7, 1, 1752-8062

Keywords:
Neuroscience, Micro- and Nanotechnology, Audiology