Surgical tactic of cochlear implantation in patients with intraoperative CSF leakage

Abstract

Cochlear implantation (CI) is currently the recognized and most promising method of rehabilitation of patients suffering from profound hearing loss and deafness. During the surgical stage of CI, one of the most unpleasant intraoperative features is CSF leakage from the cochlea opening. Most often it occurs in patients with malformations of the inner ear, with temporal bone fractures and with cochlear otosclerosis. The difficulty of choosing the tactics of surgical intervention in these patients is caused by the large variability of the anatomical structures of the inner ear. In the period from 2017 to 2021, 1954 patients underwent CI, of which 83 were patients with cochlea malformations (65 intraoperative CSF leakages), 14 with the temporal bones fractures (2 intraoperative CSF leakage), 12 with cochlear otosclerosis (1 CSF leakage), while 3 spontaneous intraoperative CSF leakages were noted in patients with normal cochlea anatomy and hyperpnumotized temporal bone pyramid and enlarged vestibular aqueduct. The highest risk of intraoperative CSF leakage was observed in patients with inner ear malformations (common cavity - 10, incomplete partition type III - 15) and anomalies of the internal auditory canal - 5 (dilated IAC - more than 8.5 mm in diameter). Moderate risk of intraoperative CSF leakage was typical for patients with incomplete partition type I (15 patients) and type II (25 patients).