A computer program designed to analyze functional MRI (fMRI) brain scans of hearing-impaired children can predict their ability to develop effective language skills within two years of cochlear implant surgery.
The computer program determines how specific regions of the brain respond to auditory stimulus tests that hearing-impaired infants and toddlers receive before surgical implantation, according to a study published online October 12 in Brain and Behavior.
Researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center said their computer model could help clinicians more effectively screen patients with sensory-neural hearing loss before surgery and could reduce the number of children who undergo the invasive and costly procedure.
The study included 44 infants and toddlers between the ages of 8 months and 67 months. Among the subjects, 23 children were hearing-impaired and underwent auditory exams and functional MRI scans prior to cochlear implant surgery. In addition, 21 children with normal hearing participated as control subjects and received standardized hearing, speech, and cognition tests.
Two years after cochlear implant surgery, the researchers measured the language performance of the cochlear implant recipients, which was used as the gold standard benchmark for the computational analysis.
They tested two types of auditory stimuli during presurgical tests that are designed to stimulate blood flow and related activity in different areas of the brain. After analyzing fMRI data from the presurgery auditory tests and the two-year, postsurgery language tests, the group found that brain activation patterns stimulated by natural language speech had greater predictive ability than narrow-band noise tones.
