Abstract
Globally, more than 1.5 billion people are affected by hearing loss, which is approximately 20% of the global population. Children with hearing loss often do not receive the same level of education compared to their peers. With hair cell loss, sound is not converted as readily to neural activity in the cochlea. In this research, we have utilized the current state-of-the-art YOLOv11 method to detect cochlear hair cells and built a generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate synthetic images of cochlear hair cells. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use YOLOv11 for the detection of cochlear hair cells. The code for this project is available at https://github.com/Cole-Krudwig/GANs-YOLO-HC.