Hallym University Kangnam Sacred Heart Hospital

Dr. Hyo-Jeong Lee, assistant professor of otolaryngology-head & neck surgery at Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital, was awarded the Politzer Prize for her paper, ‘Auditory, Visual, and Audiovisual Speech Percepton in CI Users Measured by H152O‐PET,’ at the 28th Politzer Society Meeting in Athens, Greece, September 28 - October 1, 2011.

The Politzer Society is the international organization for otologic surgery and science. Since its first meeting in Davos, Swiss in 1978, the Society has been holding the meeting every two years to share the advanced issues on otologic surgery and science. The main theme of this meeting is “Integration of basic and translational science, diagnostic and surgical procedures in order to reach finally our goal of Good Science, Better Medicine and Best Practice.”

Through her paper titled "Auditory, visual, and audiovisual speech perception in cochlear implant(CI) users measured by H215O-PET," she investigated how brain extract auditory-visual information from sensory input in profoundly deafened patients following cochlear implantation surgery. As the quality of electrical hearing provided by current technology is still crude, a period of auditory rehabilitation is mandatory after implantation in cochlear implant users. However, even after a period of training, auditory performance is widely variable among individuals and most of the outcome(auditory performance) variability is still unexplained. In this experiment which measured neural response to auditory and visual input in the cochlear implant users, brain compensatory mechanism was examined both in the sensory cortices and in the supra-modal cortices which is associated with higher cognitive function. Interestingly, a compensatory mechanism found in the frontal cortex proposed that brain mechanism to utilize visual information, which has been suggested to be developed during the period of deafness, is also applied to extract meaning from auditory information after surgery in deaf CI users. This new finding would be applied to rehabilitation strategy for hearing impaired patients.

By Sung-won Lee, Int’l Operations Team, HUMC (sungwon@hallym.or.kr)