SAS-CIS preference study in postlingually deafened adults implanted with the CLARION cochlear implant

This study examined the speech perception performance of 71 postlingually deafened adults implanted with the CLARION Multi-Strategy Cochlear Implant. After 3 months of implant use, one third of the patients (n = 23) preferred to use the Simultaneous Analog Stimulation (SAS) strategy, and two thirds of them (n = 48) chose to use the Continuous Interleaved Sampler (CIS) strategy. The mean CID sentence scores were similar for the SAS and CIS user groups at the 3-month postoperative interval. In contrast, the mean CNC word score of the SAS users was significantly higher than the mean score of the CIS users after 3 months of implant experience. Patients who preferred to use SAS demonstrated significantly shorter duration of deafness at time of implantation than did the CIS users, whereas the CIS users demonstrated significantly higher preoperative sentence recognition scores than the SAS users. The results suggested that access to a preferred processing strategy improved the overall group performance of postlingually deafened adults in the present study compared to the results of previous studies in which only the CIS strategy was available to most patients with the Clarion.