Deriving Stereocilia Displacement from the Impedance of the Organ of Corti.

The response of an inner hair cell (IHC) to a sound stimulus varies in terms of phase and harmonic content depending nonlinearly on the stimulus level. This dependency can be explained by the two factor cancellation hypothesis: two excitatory components of the opposite sign, C1 and C2, regulate the IHC receptor potential. However, it is yet unknown whether C1 and C2 represent the contribution of different stereocilia rows to the transduction of a single IHC, or whether they represent different mechanical contributions to the displacement of a single stereocilia bundle. There are also diverse theories about the physical origin of the two components. This work presents a computational model of IHCs functionality having clear physical origins for C1 and C2. In the present model C1 represents the transduction component associated with the coupling between the stereocilia and the basilar membrane (BM), while C2 represents the transduction component associated with the coupling between the stereocilia and the outer hair cells (OHCs). C1 and C2 are derived from the nonlinear cochlear model by Verhulst et al. (2012). In particular, C1 is derived from the BM velocity vector and C2 is derived from the term representing the action of the organ of Corti (OC) on BM motion. The present model is capable to simulate the dynamic response of IHCs and to emulate the dependency of the phase and harmonic content of IHCs response, being in good agreement with animal data. Furthermore, this work introduces a simple physical interpretation of C2 to phenomenological models of two-factor cancellation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]