UCSF Multichannel Cochlear Implants

Abstract

AbstractClinical trials with the UCSF/Storz multichannel cochlear implant began in February 1985. The final patient in this series was implanted in June 1986. The objective of the clinical trial was to evaluate the strategies developed by the UCSF implant team through neurophysiological, histopathological, and psychophysical investigations over the past seventeen years. A total of 16 patients were implanted with this four channel unit, a vocoder-based, compressed-analog system. Results are measured with a battery of speech reception tests, including routine audiometric tasks used to evaluate standard clinical populations. Assessments are administered using conventional audiologic procedures. Tests include monosyllabic word recognition (the standard clinical “speech discrimination” list) and the recognition of key words in sentences. Eleven of the 16 patients have now had their one-year postoperative evaluations, permitting observations on their performance over time. Of these 11 patients, ten (91%) are able to obtain a considerable degree of auditory speech recognition. Relative to other cochlear implant projects, this represents an extremely high proportion of the implant population achieving some level of auditory-only speech understanding. The UCSF/Storz clinical trial has helped to clarify and define the specifications for our next generation implant, an elecrically transparent sixteen channel system.