LED cochlear implants come out! Hope to help part of the recovery of hearing

   The application of LED light’s potential is unlimited! According to reports, research conducted by scientists at the University of Göttingen, Germany has shown that LED lights can be used to restore hearing in addition to improving vision.

    Scientists of University of Göttingen intended a man-made cochlea based on lighting of LED chips, which is helpful to restore hearing for deaf mice and gerbils. At present, sound quality of man-made cochlea is very bad, while LED cochlear can express much more exact signals to auditory nerve. At the same time, the breakthrough of this technique show that it can improve the clinical feasibility of man-made cochlear implants in the treatment of hearing disorders.

    Man-made cochlear is a kind of chemical clinical equipment, which able to partially restore the hearing of patients with hearing loss. Nearly 5% of people worldwide are affected by hearing loss. Almost man-made cochlear replicate sounds by touching, but the electricity produced is not concrete and spread a large areas of nerves to make unclear sound and lower quality hearing. Therefore, scientists turn to researching LED cochlea. After genetically modifying sound-sensing neurons, light is used to stimulate these neurons to make them respond to light. Compared to other man-made cochlea, this kind of wireless optical cochlea use many stimulated channels to integrate an energy-saving chip with blue LED lights and activate the modified neurons in the cochlea.

    The experiment is proved that LED cochlear can send more selective signals when implanted in the ears of deaf mice and gerbils. And in the course of several weeks of experiments, these animals successfully passed sound-based behavior tests. However, the research team also pointed out that a lot of work needs to be done to solve the problems of large LED cochlear size and wide light transmission range before starting clinical trials.

    It has known that the research result is published in Science Translation Medicine and the title is Multichannel optogenetic stimulation of the auditory pathway using microfabricated LED cochlear implants in rodents.