Looking back on the past two years, Mr. and Mrs. Zhao’s hearts are full of sorrows and bitterness. After his wife’s arduous pregnancy, the family was happy to welcome the birth of a new baby under everyone’s careful care and eager expectation. But the joy did not last a few days, the family became sad. It turns out that the baby did not pass the hearing screening, the child may have serious hearing problems. The family did not believe it at first because there had never been a deaf person in the family. Slowly, they noticed that the child was not responding to sound at all. With hope and more anxiety, Mr. Zhao’s family took the child to several major hospitals for more than a year after his birth, but the final result was a ruthless confirmation that the child had profound sensorineural deafness, and that even high-powered hearing aids could not help the child gain effective hearing. If left to develop, the child would inevitably become a deaf person. Mr. and Mrs. Zhao’s hearts were broken when they thought that their child would not be able to hear his mother’s and father’s warm calls, nor would he be able to call out to his mother and father in a childish manner. One day, they learned that a procedure called “cochlear implant” could help restore hearing to their deaf child, so they went to the Department of Otolaryngology at the Sixth People’s Hospital of Shanghai Jiaotong University with a glimmer of hope. The doctor performed a detailed auditory function test and finally found out the child’s condition. It turns out that in the process of forming our sense of hearing, an organ called the cochlea is needed to convert sound signals into electrical signals, which are then transmitted to the brain through the auditory nerve to form the sense of hearing. The cochlea is located deep in the ear and is a pea-sized cochlea-like structure, with one in each of the left and right ears. Although small, the cochlea is a complex and powerful structure. In the case of Mr. Zhao’s child, the cochlea is dysfunctional and cannot produce nerve signals, so sound transmission is suspended in the cochlea and the auditory nerve is as if it is empty, and the brain is unable to obtain auditory information. The cochlear implant is a powerful sound-to-electric signal converter implanted in the patient’s ear, also known as the “electronic cochlea”, which replaces the original cochlea to generate electrical signals and directly stimulates the auditory nerve, allowing sound signals to be transmitted to the brain smoothly and restoring hearing function. After understanding the child’s condition, Mr. Zhao’s family decided to change the child’s fate of deafness by getting a cochlear implant for the child. Through the joint efforts of the family and the medical staff, the child passed the perioperative period without incident. The surgeon also told Mr. Zhao that the intraoperative monitoring showed that the cochlear implant was working well. Upon hearing this, a long-awaited smile finally appeared on Mr. Zhao’s family’s face. Mr. Zhao was even more relieved that the Sixth People’s Hospital had a special charity fund for cochlear implants, and upon application and approval, the foundation paid the full cost of the child’s surgery. The child was discharged from the hospital a week after the surgery, turned on and commissioned a month later, and entered a professional rehabilitation kindergarten for speech training. “The child can speak a lot of words and hum along with the disc, so it seems to be no problem to enter the ordinary kindergarten!” Six months later, Mr. Zhao’s family was thrilled to come to the hospital to say thank you. It has long been known that a well-functioning cochlea is an important prerequisite for the development of hearing. When certain congenital diseases, viral infections during pregnancy, and difficult deliveries exist, they can cause cochlear dysfunction in newborns, resulting in sensorineural deafness. For severe to profound sensorineural deafness, neither medications nor hearing aids are able to help. It was not until the early 1980s that the introduction of the cochlear implant brought new horizons to the fight against the disease, and excellent results were achieved. Because of its effectiveness and irreplaceability, cochlear implantation has become known as the ultimate weapon in the treatment of sensorineural deafness. It is worth mentioning that the latest research shows that the best time for language learning is around 1 to 3 years of age, which is also the best window for the development of the auditory center. When cochlear implants are performed during this time, deaf children develop their hearing functions at a rate almost identical to that of normal children. Therefore, once the diagnosis is clear, it is important to receive a cochlear implant as soon as possible. As technology advances, the performance of cochlear implants has been further improved. Although the speech processor is only the size of a coin, its processing power is comparable to that of the most advanced desktop computers available. In addition, the introduction of cochlear implants with combined acoustic and electrical functions offers the possibility of preserving and utilizing the residual hearing in the affected ear, and the maturation of cochlear implantation technology will greatly reduce medical costs. According to a recent survey by the International Health Organization, sensorineural deafness is the most prevalent neurological disorder, ranking first among all diseases causing disability. Common causes include ototoxic drugs, genetics, infections, diseases, environmental noise pollution, and accidents, and can be seen in people of all ages, including children. In order to reduce the harm of deafness and promote the coordinated socio-economic development, the state launched the “Rescue Rehabilitation Program for Deaf Children in Poverty” in 2009. The cochlear implants have changed the fate of thousands of families. The Department of Otolaryngology of Shanghai Sixth People’s Hospital is a national key clinical specialty of the Ministry of Health and one of the national designated surgical units for the project. Since the mid-1990s, the Department of Otolaryngology has successfully operated on hundreds of patients with severe to profound deafness, enabling them to live in a rich and colorful world of sound like normal people.