Automatic localization of cochlear implant electrodes in CT.

Cochlear Implants (CI) are surgically implanted neural prosthetic devices used to treat severe-to-profound hearing loss. Recent studies have suggested that hearing outcomes with CIs are correlated with the location where individual electrodes in the implanted electrode array are placed, but techniques proposed for determining electrode location have been too coarse and labor intensive to permit detailed analysis on large numbers of datasets. In this paper, we present a fully automatic snake-based method for accurately localizing CI electrodes in clinical post-implantation CTs. Our results show that average electrode localization errors with the method are 0.21 millimeters. These results indicate that our method could be used in future large scale studies to analyze the relationship between electrode position and hearing outcome, which potentially could lead to technological advances that improve hearing outcomes with CIs.