Clinical results for the DIGISONIC multichannel cochlear implant.

The DIGISONIC is a digitized 15-channel cochlear implant. A special version of this implant has been designed for use in the totally obstructed cochlea. This device has 10 separate electrodes that may be inserted, one by one, into 10 different holes drilled in the bony cochlea. The device's 128-point Fast Fourier Transform analysis supplies the patient with the entire set of the sound information between 100 and 7800 Hz. The stimulation rhythm is set at a programmable frequency among 125 and 400 Hz or slaved to the fundamental pitch frequency. The flexibility 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 scientific desiderata. The authors present clinical results for the first 28 patients they treated with this cochlear implant.