Francis A. Spelman, PhD
Professor Emeritus
PhD (electrical engineering)
University of Washington, 1975
Local control of peripheral circulation; biophysics of the implanted cochlea;
bioinstrumentation
Contact Information
Department of Bioengineering
University of Washington
Box 355061
BIOE 410A
Phone: 206-543-0232, 206-543-6442
Fax: 206-685-0305
E-mail: fspelman@u.washington.edu
Personal Statement
Two million sensorineural deaf people live in the United States. Such people cannot be helped with either acoustic hearing aids or corrective surgery. Cochlear implants, on the other hand, expose the sensorineural deaf to the acoustic environment. However, the success of cochlear prostheses is variable: some patients can recognize open speech without lipreading, while others can only recognize environmental sounds, like telephone rings or automobile horns.
Understanding the electrical properties of the inner ear will improve the cochlear implant. That understanding should allow practitioners to determine the number and location of excitable cells in the auditory nerve, and to decide how best to stimulate those cells as a function of external sound. The approach to understanding the inner ear is multipathed: (1) to determine and model the anatomy of the cochlea in primates and rodents; (2) to measure the complex resistivity of cochlear tissues in vivo; (3) to model the flow of electric current in the implanted, stimulated ear; (4) to verify the models of current flow with experiments in animals; (5) to develop a noninvasive means to measure the electric fields produced in human subjects with cochlear implants.
Selected Publications
- Rodenhiser, K.L., and F.A. Spelman. A method for determining the driving currents for focused stimulation in the cochlea. IEEE Trans. on Biomed. Eng. (in press, 1995).
- Voie, A.H., D.H. Burns, and F.A. Spelman. Orthogonal-plane f luorescence optical sectioning: Three-dimensional imaging of macroscopic biological specimens. J. Microscopy 170:3, 229-236, 1993.
- Suesserman, M.F., and F.A. Spelman. Lumped-parameter model for in vivo cochlear stimulation. IEEE T rans. on Biomed. Eng. BME-40:237-245, 1993.
- Suesserman, M.F., and F.A. Spelman. Quantitative, in vivo measurements of inner ear tissue resistivities: I. In vitro characterization. IEEE Trans. on Biomed. Eng. BME 40:1032-1047, 1993.