Vol 39, No 1 (2025)

Indications for cochlear implantation are constantly expanding, going beyond severe and complete hearing loss, including patients with unilateral deafness and, recently, with congenital inner ear malformations (Karamert et al., 2022). Among congenital cases of sensorineural hearing loss, inner ear malformations (IEM) account for approximately 20% of cases, with up to 35% of them meeting the criteria for cochlear implantation (Sennaroglu et al., 2017).

Due to the wider use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computerized tomography (CT) scanning of the temporal bone, the population of cochlear implant (CI) recipients among patients with IEM is also expanding, which naturally requires a retrospective assessment of clinical outcomes. At the same time, it is certainly important to evaluate not only the surgical results, which characterize, first of all, the safety of CI in this subgroup of patients, but also audiological outcomes: the degree of restoration of speech and auditory perception, without which it is impossible to get a complete picture of the effectiveness of cochlear implantation.

Given the diverse anatomy of the cochlea in IEM, when planning cochlear implantation, determining of the electrode subtype, length and depth of its insertion, as well as the choice between CI or auditory brainstem implantation is of paramount importance not only for the success of the surgical intervention itself, but also for the results of subsequent auditory and speech rehabilitation. The purpose of this review is to analyze actual data about the audiological results assessment of cochlear implantation in patients with congenital IEM compared to patients with normal cochlear anatomy. We tried to identify IEM, in which CI gives the best results, as well as those malformations that require careful planning of surgery, specific selection of the electrode, as well as prevention of possible perioperative complications.

A sound signal with a rippled spectrum exhibits envelope periodicity, which is absent in signals with a continuous spectrum. The study investigated the role of the signal envelope in discriminating signals with rippled spectra. The test signal was noise with a rippled spectrum and a spectral bandwidth of 2 octaves. Noise with a continuous spectrum was used as a reference signal. The experiments involved listeners with different levels of auditory sensitivity. To assess the ability to distinguish the density of rippled spectrum, a phase-reversal test was applied. Discrimination thresholds for spectral density were determined depending on the ripple spacing for two types of signals: without envelope modulation and with added envelope modulation. A decrease in auditory sensitivity resulted in a reduced ability to discriminate spectral density at all ripple spacing values. Amplitude modulation led to a deterioration in discrimination ability across all listeners and for all ripple spacing values, though not to thresholds determined by spectral mechanisms. It is suggested that discrimination in this task is driven by a temporal analysis mechanism rather than by envelope periodicity. The addition of modulation reduced the perception of repetition pitch.

Postlingually deaf patients, unlike those who lost their hearing at an early age, retain previously formed control based on a direct connection between hearing and speech. At the same time, patients with hearing impairment show changes in the speech production compared to those who hear normally, which are caused by a deterioration in the feedback of auditory communication. To what extent the auditory control that is impaired in sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) can be compensated for with hearing aids remains a little-studied question. A study of the effect of restored auditory control on articulatory motor skills with adequate hearing aids has been conducted. A comparison of the durations of stressed vowels and individual words in speech uttered with and without a hearing aid was performed in 12 speakers (6 of them men) with moderately severe chronic SNHL. For stressed vowels [a], [i], [u], which make up the vertices of the vowel triangle for the Russian language, in all positions – the beginning, middle and end of the word, a significant decrease in their duration was revealed when wearing hearing aids compared to speaking without them. In most cases, the duration of stressed vowels varied by about 10%, and the duration of individual words containing such vowels by 5%. A decrease in the duration of stressed vowels and individual words can be an objective indicator for evaluating the effectiveness of auditory prosthetics to restore auditory feedback and normalize speech motor skills.

Patients with diabetes mellitus have a decreased olfactory function compared to healthy individuals. Hyposmia is more common in type 2 diabetes (DM2) and is characterized by a decreased ability to recognize odors, impaired olfactory memory, which reduces the quality of life of patients. The mechanisms of hyposmia require studies in animal models, but no such studies have been performed in most commonly used animal models of DM2. The aim of the present study was to investigate olfactory function in the model of nicotinamide-streptozotocin-induced DM2 in rats using widely used behavioral tests of food search performance by smell and olfactory preference. The model of DM2 in male rats showed a decrease in performance and an increase in the time spent on searching for food objects by smell, compared to the control group, which suggests that diabetic animals develop hyposmia. The results of the test for differentiation of the pheromonal mimetic isovaleric acid from bio-indifferent odorants showed no differences between the groups. These results indicate that the development of DM2 in adult rats predominantly affects the functioning of the main olfactory system rather than the functioning of the additional system responsible for the perception of pheromones and pheromonal mimetics.

The ability of automated vehicles (AVs) to determine the position of objects in three-dimensional space plays a key role in motion planning. The implementation of algorithms that solve this problem is particularly difficult for systems that use only monocular cameras, as depth estimation is a non-trivial task for them. Nevertheless, such systems are widespread due to their relative cheapness and ease of use. In this paper, we propose a method to determine the position of vehicles (the most common type of objects in urban scenes) in the form of oriented bounding boxes in birds’-eye view based on an image obtained from a single monocular camera. This method consists of two steps. In the first step, a projection of the visible boundary of the vehicle in the birds’-eye view is computed based on 2D obstacle detections and roadway segmentation in the image. The resulting projection is assumed to represent the noisy measurements of the two orthogonal sides of the vehicle. In the second step, an oriented bounding box is constructed around the obtained projection. For this stage, we propose a new algorithm for constructing the bounding box based on the assumption of the L-shape model. The algorithm was tested on a prepared real-world dataset. The proposed L-shape algorithm outperformed the best of the compared algorithms in terms of the Jaccard coefficient (Intersection over Union, IoU) by 2.7%.