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

Speech recognition for 40 patients receiving multichannel cochlear implants

Publisher’s permission requested and denied.We collected data on 40 patients who received the Nucleus multichannel cochlear implant. Results were reviewed to determine if the coding strategy is effective in transmitting the intended speech features and to assess patient benefit in terms of communication skills. All patients demonstrated significant improvement over preoperative results with a hearing aid for both lipreading enhancement and speech recognition without lipreading. Of the patients, 50% demonstrated ability to understand connected discourse with auditory input only. For the 23 patients who were tested 12 months postoperatively, there was substantial improvement in open-set speech recognition

Preliminary results for the Cochlear Corporation multielectrode intracochlear implant in six prelingually deaf patients

This is a publisher’s version of an article published in American Journal of Otology 1987. This version is reproduced with permission of Lippincott Wilkins & Williams.The preliminary results from this study indicate that some prelingually deaf patients may get worthwhile help from a multiple-electrode cochlear implant that uses a formant-based speech processing strategy. It is encouraging that these improvements can occur in young adults and teenagers. The results for two children are also encouraging. A 10-year-old child obtained significant improvement on some speech perception tests. It was easy to set thresholds and comfortable listening levels on a 5-year-old child, and he is now a regular user of the device. There are, however, considerable variations in performance among the prelingual patients, which may be related to the following factors: whether they have had some hearing after birth, the method of education used, the motivation of the patient, and age at implantation