Prof Timms is widely experienced in cochlear implantation surgery in patients ranging in age from 8 months to 60 years. He was the first surgeon to routinely perform simultaneous 2 sided CI on babies in the Middle East. He also has experience of treating complications of CI surgery in cases treated at other centers. Before any decision is made on surgery, patients undergo extensive hearing assessment and CT and or MRI scanning. CI surgery is complicated, but not traumatic. Patients usually go home one or two days after surgery and experience minimal pain.
A cochlear implant is a small, complex electronic device that can help to provide a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard-of-hearing. The implant consists of an external portion that sits behind the ear and a second portion that is surgically placed under the skin. An implant has the following parts:
- A microphone, which picks up sound from the environment.
- A speech processor, which selects and arranges sounds picked up by the microphone.
- A transmitter and receiver/stimulator, which receive signals from the speech processor and convert them into electric impulses.
- An electrode array, which is a group of electrodes that collects the impulses from the stimulator and sends them to different regions of the auditory nerve.
- An implant does not restore normal hearing. Instead, it can give a deaf person a useful representation of sounds in the environment and help him or her to understand speech.