Health service costs of paediatric cochlear implantation: influence of the scale and scope of activity

The health service cost of paediatric cochlear implantation (CI) varies among hospitals in the UK. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the variation is associated with differences in the scale and scope of activity in CI programmes. The health service cost of CI was estimated for 908 children implanted in 12 hospitals between 1989 and 1998. Annual levels of activity in implanting children and adults were monitored in the same hospitals. Costs of paediatric CI were lower in hospitals implanting larger numbers of children and adults, thereby benefiting from economies of scale and scope, respectively. These economies arose from lower per-child staff costs in larger programmes, and were estimated to be exhausted when a hospital implanted more than nine children and more than 20 adults each year. Accommodating increased numbers of children in an existing programme is predicted to cost less than setting up a new programme

Contralateral routing of signal (CROS) systems, and contralateral hearing aids with single side cochlear implantation vs. bilateral implantation

Our objective was to evaluate the comparative benefit of CROS systems and contralateral hearing aids (bimodal use) in single sided implantees, and contrast this with bilateral (second-side) cochlear implantation. A prospective, randomized cross-over trial was used to evaluate the two systems. Subjects then continued using their preferred system for an acclimatization period. Performance on speech in noise tasks and localization tasks was evaluated. Subjective benefit was assessed by standardized questionnaires. Speech in noise and localization performance for the systems will be presented, and contrasted with bilateral cochlear implant performance. Implications for the feasibility of using CROS systems or hearing aids as alternatives to bilateral implantation will be discussed

Basilar-membrane nonlinearity and forward masking

No abstract

The processing of audio-visual speech: empirical and neural bases

In this selective review, I outline a number of ways in which seeing the talker affects auditory perception of speech, including, but not confined to, the McGurk effect. To date, studies suggest that all linguistic levels are susceptible to visual influence, and that two main modes of processing can be described: a complementary mode, whereby vision provides information more efficiently than hearing for some under-specified parts of the speech stream, and a correlated mode, whereby vision partially duplicates information about dynamic articulatory patterning