Notice of RetractionNumerical study on the effect of attachment points of middle ear actuator on the movement of the stapes

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

Several types of middle ear implants have been invented as an alternative to conventional hearing aids for the rehabilitation of sensorineural hearing loss. To study the effect of the attachment points of their actuator on the movement of the stapes, a human middle ear finite element model was constructed. This model was build based on a complete set of computerized tomography section images of a healthy volunteer´s left ear by reverse engineering technology. The result shows that the incus long process is an ideal attachment point for middle ear actuator as only a small excitation force is required to compensate the same level of hearing loss. In addition, the stapes piston motion is less sensitive to the changes in the direction of the excitation force in this case.