Advances with the 22-channel cochlear implant

The Nucleus 22 Channel Cochlear Implant was developed on the basis of work at the University of Melbourne. Between 1967 and 1978, there was extensive research with animals and human temporal bones, especially regarding safety, psychophysics, histopathology and surgical approaches. As a result of this work, it was decided to develop a multi-channel intracochlear implant. The 22 channel implant has been used in more than 500 patients world-wide but there were many steps on the road to this success. Today, over one third of the post-lingually profound, deaf adults implanted with this device have significant speech understanding without lipreading.6-9 April 198