CLINICAL-RESULTS FOR THE DIGISONIC MULTICHANNEL COCHLEAR IMPLANT

The DIGISONIC is a digitized 15-channel cochlear implant. A special ve rsion of this implant has been designed for use in the totally obstruc ted cochlea. This device has 10 separate electrodes that may be insert ed, one by one, into 10 different holes drilled in the bony cochlea, T he device's 128-point Fast Fourier Transform analysis supplies the pat ient with the entire set of the sound information between 100 and 7800 Hz. The stimulation rhythm is set at a programmable frequency among 1 25 and 400 Hz or slaved to the fundamental pitch frequency, The flexib ility of the microprocessor makes it possible to select the best width and mean value of each frequency band for each electrode. Many speech -coding strategies may be easily programmed as a function of scientifi c desiderata. The authors present clinical results for the first 28 pa tients they treated with this cochlear implant.