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Updated: Aug 16, 2026
Deep Brain Stimulation with Simultaneous fMRI in Rodents
Published on: February 15, 2014
Comparison of a paired or sequential stimulation paradigm with advanced bionics' high-resolution mode
Andreas Buechner1, Carolin Frohne-Buechner, Timo Stoever
1Department of Otolaryngology, Medizinische Hochschule Hannover, Hannover, Germany. buechner@hoerzentrum-hannover.de
Objective:
Simultaneous stimulation on two channels was investigated with respect to fully sequential stimulation while controlling for the number of channels and the stimulation rate used.
Study Design:
Only subjects having at least 6 months' experience with conventional Clarion speech coding strategies (CIS, PPS, or SAS) were included. A counterbalanced cross-over design was used to compare the paired stimulation paradigm to the sequential stimulation paradigm.
Setting:
The investigation was a prospective, within-subject, repeated-measures experiment.
Patients:
The study group consisted of 13 postlingually deafened adult subjects.
Interventions:
The following programs were evaluated: 1) 16-channel paired stimulation with 5000 pps per channel; 2) 16-channel sequential stimulation with 2500 pps per channel; and 3) 8-channel sequential stimulation with 5000 pps per channel.
Main Outcome Measures:
Speech perception tests in quiet and noise, Quality Assessment Questionnaire.
Results:
On average, both sequential stimulation programs showed comparable results, whereas the program with paired stimulation, on average, provided poorer performance. Several subjects showed a remarkable drop in performance when changing from sequential to paired mode. Although a few subjects showed better performance in quiet when using paired stimulation, they still had poorer performance in noise. A weak trend was found linking the difference between program levels in paired or in sequential stimulation paradigm to the difference in performance with these two settings.
Conclusion:
Results indicate that for all subjects in this group sequential stimulation is more appropriate than paired stimulation. Subjective reports, as well as formal speech perception testing, show that the difference between the two paradigms is pronounced, especially when evaluating in the presence of background noise, the test condition more representative of everyday listening.
