Seminar Charlotte Borgers - 25 October 2018

Bekijk de webversie

Invitation Research Seminar ExpORL, Dept. Neurosciences Investigation of the cochlear mechanics involved in bone conduction transmission. Charlotte Borgers Research Seminar When? Thursday, 25 October 2018, 14:30 Where? Seminar room HP2 O&N 2 - KU Leuven Herestraat 49 B-3000 Leuven Abstract The exact cochlear transmission mechanisms of bone conduction stimulation are unknown. Standard stapes velocity measurements, however, are insufficient to disentangle these complex mechanisms. Differential cochlear pressure has been found to be a good estimation of the cochlear input and is therefore a suitable measurement to study the cochlear mechanics involved in bone conduction transmission. I will discuss a special test-setup that was further established and validated during my PhD-project. Using commercial fiber-optic pressure sensors, the differential pressure across the cochlear partition in human cadaveric temporal bones was measured during bone conduction stimulation. Results of this first study will be presented during the presentation. In addition, I will also present some preliminary results of an ongoing study on human fresh-frozen cadaveric heads, in which a novel active transcutaneous bone conduction implant is characterized in terms of output and implant location. Furthermore, I will give an overview of future steps and planned milestones. Please reply to this email if you are planning to attend the presentation. Copyright KU Leuven

Seminar Jana Van Canneyt - 1 October 2018

Bekijk de webversie

Invitation Research Seminar ExpORL, Dept. Neurosciences Towards Speech-evoked Frequency Following Responses in Cochlear Implant Users. Jana Van Canneyt Research Seminar When? Monday, 1 October 2018, 16:00-17:00 Where? Seminar room HP4 O&N2, 4th floor, Gasthuisberg (KU Leuven) Herestraat 49 B-3000 Leuven Abstract Frequency-following responses (FFR) reflect dynamic, phase-locked neural activity to the spectro-temporal features of the evoking stimulus. They are recorded using EEG and the evoking stimuli can vary widely in complexity, i.e. from repeated modulated tones to running speech. FFRs have provided information on neural encoding of speech and music in the acoustically stimulated auditory system, and on how this encoding changes with learning, ageing and (language) experience. This type of research would be very valuable in the context of cochlear implant users, as processing of electrical auditory stimulation is less understood. Over the last years, our lab has investigated FFRs in cochlear implant (CI) users for amplitude modulated stimuli with modulation frequencies up to 100 Hz. In this seminar, I will discuss our pilot studies with modulation frequencies up to 300 Hz and our future plans to work towards speech-evoked FFRs in CI users. Besides this, I will discuss our recent study on the effect of envelope shape on the FFR in normal hearing listeners. Please reply to this email if you are planning to attend the presentation. Copyright KU Leuven

Seminar Annelore Willaert - 19 September 2018

Bekijk de webversie

Invitation Research Seminar ExpORL, Dept. Neurosciences Cochleovestibular fragility: the human and murine 22q11 Deletion syndrome model. Annelore Willaert Research Seminar When? Wednesday, 19 September 2018, 9:00-10:00 Where? Seminar room HP1 O&N2, 4th floor, Gasthuisberg (KU Leuven) Herestraat 49 B-3000 Leuven Abstract The 22q11 deletion syndrome (22q11DS) is the most common chromosomal microdeletion syndrome in humans, characterized mainly by various degrees of congenital heart disease, cleft palate and learning difficulties. Hearing loss is usually attributed to chronic middle ear disease, but recent research also shows an unexplained high rate of sensorineural hearing loss, as well as an abnormal equilibrium. We propose the concept of cochleovestibular fragility, referring to an increased vulnerability of the inner ear function in 22q11DS. As such, environmental factors such as high level noise exposure or middle ear infection lead to damage of the inner ear with sensorineural hearing loss, with a higher susceptibility than we would expect when compared to a healthy population. We investigate this hypothesis both by performing human clinical studies (on hearing and vestibular function, and on immunological factors in middle ear inflammation) and by histological research in a mouse model of 22q11DS, acknowledging the multifactorial influences. Please reply to this email if you are planning to attend the presentation. Copyright KU Leuven

Seminar Eline Verschueren - 18 September 2018

Bekijk de webversie

Invitation Research Seminar ExpORL, Dept. Neurosciences Neural envelope tracking as a measure of speech understanding in CI users. Eline Verschueren Research Seminar When? Tuesday, 18 September 2018, 14:00-15:00 Where? Seminar room ALO 05.200 ALO Building, Onderwijs en Navorsing, Gasthuisberg (KU Leuven) Herestraat 49 B-3000 Leuven Abstract The speech envelope is known to be essential for speech understanding and can be reconstructed from the EEG signal in response to running speech. Recent studies have shown that neural tracking of the speech envelope can be linked to speech understanding in normal hearing listeners, indicating the potential of this measure as an objective measure of speech understanding. Despite the achieved success in normal hearing listeners, it has barely been investigated in persons wearing cochlear implants (CI). Therefore, in the present study, we recorded the EEG in CI users while presenting running speech and linked neural envelope tracking results to actual speech understanding. Please reply to this email if you are planning to attend the presentation. Copyright KU Leuven

ExpORL at IHCON 2018

CONFERENCE PARTICIPATION
    

Last week, The International Hearing Aid Research Conference (IHCON) 2018 took place in Granlibakken, California, USA from August 15-19.

Eight ExpORL members were present. Eline Verschueren and Annelies Devesse contributed with interesting talks. 

Tilde Van Hirtum, Robin Gransier and Jana Van Canneyt shared their work with poster presentations. 

 Benjamin Dieudonné presented both a talk and a poster.

As always, this conference provided an excellent environment to share and discuss our work with the scientific community in our field. We have come back inspired and full of new ideas.

Thank you to the organizing committee and all the personnel of Granlibakken Tahoe resort for a fantastic conference!

Seminar Tobias Overath - 17 July 2018

Bekijk de webversie

Invitation Research Seminar ExpORL, Dept. Neurosciences Acoustic and linguistic processing of speech-specific temporal structure Tobias Overath Research Seminar When? Tuesday, 17 July 2018, 13:00 Abstract Speech perception entails the mapping of the acoustic waveform to its linguistic representation. For this transformation to succeed, the speech signal needs to be tracked across a large temporal range at high temporal precision in order to decode linguistic units ranging from phonemes (10s of milliseconds) to sentences (seconds). The nature of this analysis - where and how temporal speech properties are processed in the human auditory system, where and how they interface with linguistic representations - is still not fully understood. We have recently developed a novel ‘speech quilting’ algorithm (Overath et al., 2015) that controls the temporal structure of speech at various temporal scales (30 to 960 ms), and have shown (1) that superior temporal sulcus is sensitive to the analysis of such acoustic speech structure, and 2) that this is independent of linguistic analysis (speech stimuli were in a foreign language). I will present new fMRI and EEG data from our lab that explicitly allows the dissociation of acoustic and linguistic analyses by comparing the same acoustic manipulation (speech quilting) in two languages (familiar, foreign). Where? Seminar room 04.226 (HP1) O&N II - KU Leuven Herestraat 49 B-3000 Leuven Please reply to this email if you are planning to attend the presentation. Copyright KU Leuven

Seminar Dr. Jorg Buchholz and Drs. Javier Badajoz Davila - 2 July 2018

Bekijk de webversie

Invitation Research Seminar ExpORL, Dept. Neurosciences More realistic assessment of hearing ability and device benefit in the laboratory Dr. Jorg Buchholz Macquarie University & National Acoustic Laboratories, Australia Cochlear implant performance in virtual sound environments Drs. Javier Badajoz Davila Macquarie University & National Acoustic Laboratories, Australia Research Seminar When? Monday, 2 July 2018, 13:00 Where? Seminar room GS1 O&N 1, 4th floor - KU Leuven Herestraat 49 B-3000 Leuven Please reply to this email if you are planning to attend the presentation. Copyright KU Leuven