INITIAL INDEPENDENT RESULTS WITH THE CLARION COCHLEAR IMPLANT

Objectives: This paper reports some preliminary findings from patients , implanted at the University of Iowa, using the Advanced Bionics Clar ion cochlear implant (version 1.0). We compared the performance of pat ients using both simultaneous analog and nonsimultaneous pulsatile pro cessing strategies. The performance of Clarion patients was also compa red with a group of patients who were using either the feature-extract ion Nucleus cochlear implant or the compressed-analog Ineraid cochlear implant. Design: One aim was to compare the analog and pulsatile stim ulation in 19 patients using the Clarion implant. This aim could be ac complished only partially because of difficulties encountered in adequ ately fitting patients with the analog strategy. A second aim was to c ompare the Clarion users' performance with feature-extraction Nucleus and compressed-analog Ineraid patients. Comparisons were made with all patients having 9 mo experience postimplantation. Results: Subjects p erformed better using the pulsatile mode compared with the analog mode . All subjects chose to use the pulsatile strategy after the first 3 m o of the study. Results comparing performance at 9 mo with our compres sed-analog Ineraid and feature-extraction Nucleus patients indicated, in general, better average performance for the Clarion users. Conclusi ons: We conclude that the pulsatile version of the Clarion cochlear im plant typically produces superior performance to the analog version of that device at this stage in its development. After 9 mo of experienc e, users of the Clarion implant are performing better than are users o f the feature-extraction Nucleus and compressed-analog Ineraid cochlea r implants with comparable amounts of experience.