Bart Vaerenberg

University of Antwerp | UA · Department of Physics

Understanding and predicting the impact of MAP changes on the electrical current delivered at the level of cochlear implant (CI) electrodes is challenging. However, it is an important prerequisite for effectively programming these devices in clinical practice. This article describes a graphical representation to illustrate the intensity-coding beha...

The perception of pitch has recently gained attention. At present, clinical audiologic tests to assess this are hardly available. This article reports on the development of a clinical test using harmonic intonation (HI) and disharmonic intonation (DI). Prospective collection of normative data and pilot study in hearing-impaired subjects. Tertiary r...

An intelligent agent, Fitting to Outcomes eXpert, was developed to optimize and automate Cochlear implant (CI) programming. The current article describes the rationale, development, and features of this tool. Cochlear implant fitting is a time-consuming procedure to define the value of a subset of the available electric parameters based primarily o...

This report describes the application of the software tool "Fitting to Outcomes eXpert" (FOX) in programming the cochlear implant (CI) processor in new users. FOX is an intelligent agent to assist in the programming of CI processors. The concept of FOX is to modify maps on the basis of specific outcome measures, achieved using heuristic logic and b...

Objective. The paper aims to demonstrate the feasibility of defining a substantial set of psychoacoustic outcome measures with preset targets and to adopt a systematic methodology for reaching these targets in a large group of subjects, by more than one clinical centre. Design. Retrospective data analysis. Setting. Multicentre with 14 participating...

Valider une nouvelle méthode d’audiométrie vocale utilisant des listes personnalisées, enregistrées par le sujet à tester, et bénéficiant d’une notation automatique.

Objectives: To validate a novel speech audiometry method using customized self-voice recorded word lists with automated scoring. Patients and methods: The self-voice effect was investigated by comparing results with prerecorded or self-recorded CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) word lists. Then customized lists of 3-phoneme words were drawn up usi...

Objective: To compare the fitting time requirements and the efficiency in achieving improvements in speech perception during the first 6 months after initial stimulation of computer-assisted fitting with the Fitting to Outcome eXpert' (FOX) and a standard clinical fitting procedure. Method: Twenty-seven post-lingually deafened adults, newly impl...

Objectives: To evaluate the possible impact of 'Fitting to Outcomes eXpert (FOX(®))' on cochlear implant (CI) fitting in a clinic with extensive experience of fitting a range of CI systems, as a way to assess whether a software tool such as FOX is able to complement standard clinical procedures. Methods: Ten adult post-lingually deafened and uni...

The programming of CIs is essential for good performance. However, no Good Clinical Practice guidelines exist. This paper reports on the results of an inventory of the current practice worldwide. A questionnaire was distributed to 47 CI centers. They follow 47600 recipients in 17 countries and 5 continents. The results were discussed during a debat...

Severe and profound hearing losses can be treated with cochlear implants (CI). Given that a CI may have up to 150 tunable parameters, adjusting them is a highly complex task. For this reason, we decided to build a decision support system based on a new type of probabilistic graphical model (PGM) that we call tuning networks. Given the results of a...

Objective The estimation of perceptive thresholds is a basic element of psychoacoustics. One of the drawbacks of commonly used adaptive algorithms is the lack of reliability when the behavioral response is not robust. To address this issue an adaptive algorithm, TEMA (Threshold Estimation by Managed Algorithm), has been developed. Design TEMA seek...

In the literature, languages have been identified as having more or less transparent orthographies, depending on the degree of predictability of their spelling-to-sound correspondences. Quantitative measures based on large-scaled language corpora which are capable to objectively assess such cross-linguistic variation are rather scarce. The quantita...

The clinical assessment of speech discrimination by professional audiologists is resource intensive. Yet discrepancies in language or dialect between the test subject and the audiologist may cause a significant bias in the test result. To address these issues, a speech audiometric test (SAT) has been designed to be language/dialect independent and...

Objective: To assess the auditory performance of Digisonic(®) cochlear implant users with electric stimulation (ES) and electro-acoustic stimulation (EAS) with special attention to the processing of low-frequency temporal fine structure. Method: Six patients implanted with a Digisonic(®) SP implant and showing low-frequency residual hearing were...

Objectives: The auditory speech sounds evaluation 2009 test battery for assessment of speech pitch perception is presented. It was designed to (a) assess perception of pitch in linguistic contexts without the confounds of secondary acoustic cues, (b) be usable with listeners from different language backgrounds, and (c) be suitable for use in a cli...

Background Pitch relates to the low frequency temporal content of sound, which mainly depends on phase coding at the level of the auditory nerve. In this study, we aim to assess the detectibility of pitch changes in different populations of hearingimpaired subjects suffering from sensorineural hearing loss in order to identify possible poor tempora...