Image credit: Anton Vierietin/iStock
Hearing loss and balance disorders affect millions, yet scientists know surprisingly little about the inner ear, the tiny, hidden organs responsible for both. “Hearing is an incredibly complicated process,” said Carl Kesselman, William M. Keck Professor of Engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. “The anatomy is complex and the data is sparse.”
Because the inner ear is buried deep within the skull, it’s nearly impossible to study in living people. For decades, scientists have had to rely on rare donations after death. Now, a collaboration between USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI), the Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC, and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) is taking on that challenge by creating EarBase, a national database of the organs of hearing and balance.
Building a National Resource
The effort combines three key elements: a donor registry that encourages and coordinates the donation of temporal bones, the bones that house the delicate organs responsible for hearing and balance; a national network of specialized labs to process and study the tissue; and a central database that stores and shares the data. The database will be the repository for data generated by the laboratories past, present, and future, and a hub for data sharing and analysis. By bringing these pieces together, the project ensures that each rare donation benefits the entire field rather than a single lab.
