Understanding the human inner ear anatomy and its internal structures is paramount to advance hearing implant technology. While the emergence of imaging devices allowed researchers to improve understanding of intracochlear structures, the difficulties to collect appropriate data has resulted in studies conducted with few samples. To assist the cochlear research community, a large collection of human temporal bone images is being made available. This data descriptor, therefore, describes a rich set of image volumes acquired using cone beam computed tomography and micro-CT modalities, accompanied by manual delineations of the cochlea and sub-compartments, a statistical shape model encoding its anatomical variability, and data for electrode insertion and electrical simulations. This data makes an important asset for future studies in need of high-resolution data and related statistical data objects of the cochlea used to leverage scientific hypotheses. It is of relevance to anatomists, audiologists, computer scientists in the different domains of image analysis, computer simulations, imaging formation, and for biomedical engineers designing new strategies for cochlear implantations, electrode design, and others.

This work was financially supported by the European Commission FP7 (HEAR-EU European project #304857 http://www.hear-eu.eu) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (Nano- Tera initiative project title Hear-Restore). In addition, this work is partly supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the Maria de Maeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015-0502).