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      Spiral Form of the Human Cochlea Results from Spatial Constraints

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          Abstract

          The human inner ear has an intricate spiral shape often compared to shells of mollusks, particularly to the nautilus shell. It has inspired many functional hearing theories. The reasons for this complex geometry remain unresolved. We digitized 138 human cochleae at microscopic resolution and observed an astonishing interindividual variability in the shape. A 3D analytical cochlear model was developed that fits the analyzed data with high precision. The cochlear geometry neither matched a proposed function, namely sound focusing similar to a whispering gallery, nor did it have the form of a nautilus. Instead, the innate cochlear blueprint and its actual ontogenetic variants were determined by spatial constraints and resulted from an efficient packing of the cochlear duct within the petrous bone. The analytical model predicts well the individual 3D cochlear geometry from few clinical measures and represents a clinical tool for an individualized approach to neurosensory restoration with cochlear implants.

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          A cochlear frequency-position function for several species--29 years later.

          D GREENWOOD (1990)
          Accurate cochlear frequency-position functions based on physiological data would facilitate the interpretation of physiological and psychoacoustic data within and across species. Such functions might aid in developing cochlear models, and cochlear coordinates could provide potentially useful spectral transforms of speech and other acoustic signals. In 1961, an almost-exponential function was developed (Greenwood, 1961b, 1974) by integrating an exponential function fitted to a subset of frequency resolution-integration estimates (critical bandwidths). The resulting frequency-position function was found to fit cochlear observations on human cadaver ears quite well and, with changes of constants, those on elephant, cow, guinea pig, rat, mouse, and chicken (Békésy, 1960), as well as in vivo (behavioral-anatomical) data on cats (Schucknecht, 1953). Since 1961, new mechanical and other physiological data have appeared on the human, cat, guinea pig, chinchilla, monkey, and gerbil. It is shown here that the newer extended data on human cadaver ears and from living animal preparations are quite well fit by the same basic function. The function essentially requires only empirical adjustment of a single parameter to set an upper frequency limit, while a "slope" parameter can be left constant if cochlear partition length is normalized to 1 or scaled if distance is specified in physical units. Constancy of slope and form in dead and living ears and across species increases the probability that the function fitting human cadaver data may apply as well to the living human ear. This prospect increases the function's value in plotting auditory data and in modeling concerned with speech and other bioacoustic signals, since it fits the available physiological data well and, consequently (if those data are correct), remains independent of, and an appropriate means to examine, psychoacoustic data and assumptions.
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            Self-similarity in the distribution and abundance of species

            Collin Green, A Kinzig, Daniel Harte (1999)
            If the fraction of species in area A that are also found in one-half of that area is independent of A, the distribution of species is self-similar and a number of observed patterns in ecology, including the widely cited species-area relationship connecting species richness to censused area, follow. Self-similarity also leads to a species-abundance distribution, which deviates considerably from the commonly assumed lognormal distribution and predicts considerably more rare species than the latter. Because the abundance distribution is derived under the condition of self-similarity, it may be widely applicable beyond ecology.
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              Single-neuron labeling in the cat auditory nerve.

              M Liberman (1982)
              Single auditory nerve fibers in the cat were labeled intracellularly with horseradish peroxidase. The sample of fibers was selected to represent different response types over a wide range of characteristic frequencies. All 56 labeled neurons were found to be radial fibers innervating inner hair cells, suggesting that none of the single-unit data reported to date has been from the outer hair cell innervation. Differences in rates of spontaneous discharge and thresholds to tones among these labeled neurons were closely correlated with morphological differences in the caliber and location of their unmyelinated terminals on the body of the inner hair cell.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                A. Kral: kral.andrej@mh-hannover.de
                Journal
                Journal ID (nlm-ta): Sci Rep
                Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Sci Rep
                Title: Scientific Reports
                Publisher: Nature Publishing Group UK (London )
                ISSN (Electronic): 2045-2322
                Publication date (Electronic): 8 August 2017
                Publication date PMC-release: 8 August 2017
                Publication date Collection: 2017
                Volume: 7
                Electronic Location Identifier: 7500
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Institute of AudioNeuroTechnology & Dept. of Experimental Otology, ENT Clinics, School of Medicine, Hanover Medical University, Hanover, Germany
                [2 ]Institute of Biometry, School of Medicine, Hanover Medical University, Hanover, Germany
                [3 ]ISNI 0000 0000 9482 7121, GRID grid.267313.2, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, , The University of Texas, ; Dallas, USA
                Article
                Publisher ID: 7795
                DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-07795-4
                PMC ID: 5548794
                PubMed ID: 28790422
                SO-VID: 002a1933-4a62-4e10-b298-66e9d6ad0416
                Copyright © © The Author(s) 2017
                License:

                Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                Date received : 30 March 2017
                Date accepted : 29 June 2017
                Categories
                Subject: Article
                Custom metadata
                issue-copyright-statement © The Author(s) 2017

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