In yet another feather in the cap of the medical community of the city the first cochlear implant surgery was performed here.
Earlier, those requiring cochlear implants had to go to either to Hyderabad or to neighbouring Guntur. Father and son cochlear implant surgery team Bayya Srinivasa Rao and Sudhir have performed 325 implants either for Arogyasri or regular patients at their Guntur hospital.
The team has now opened a branch in the city at the Vijaya Talkies Centre.
Addressing a press conference here on Monday, Dr Sudhir said that a cochlear hearing device was implanted in a three-year-old boy at the Sravya ENT and Implant Hospital. The father of the boy said that he was referred to the hospital here when he tried to take him to Hyderabad.
Dr Sudhir said over one lakh babies were born deaf in India. Early identification and intervention was very important. The best results were obtained if the surgery was performed before the child was two years.
This type of electronic device was usefully only for persons who were severely hard of hearing, he said. The device had an internal part that was placed surgically under the skin behind the ear and an external part that looked like a hearing aid.
The internal part was a ‘receiver’ and ‘stimulator’ was set in the skull beneath the skin.
The internal part converted the signals from the external part into electric impulses and sends them through an internal cable to electrodes which sent impulses directly to the brain via the cochlea. The eardrum was completely bypassed.
The external part of the device which was run by a battery had microphones, a speech processor and a transmitter.
The clever device transmitted sound signals across the skin to the internal device by electromagnetic induction, Dr Sudhir explained.
The high end implants had various types of noise and sound filters, he said.
