First clinical experience with the new cochlear implant HiFokus SlimJ from Advanced Bionics

Initial Experience With a Recently Developed Lateral Wall Electrode

“…D4's three perceptible thresholds was found in Soda‐Merhy's analysis 25 and was thought to be a less stringent criterion to round things out. Salcher implanted ten patients with the electrode of interest and found that postoperative threshold shift was <30 dB for nine and believed that hearing preservation rates would be “promising.” 4 The same group implanted 20 patients with the same electrode and found median hearing loss for the whole group to be 16.3 dB at 4 months, with just over half experiencing a hearing loss of ≤15 dB. However, percent hearing loss or application of other definitions were not applied 2 .…”

“…The electrode of interest was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2017 and has a “thin, straight design” with the goal of minimizing trauma during insertion 1 . The electrode hugs the lateral wall, has 16 contact points, a maximal insertion depth of 23 mm, and a tapered design that takes into account the lateral height of the scala tympani along the cochlear partition as ascertained from microCT data 2–5 . We present our retrospective experience with this electrode, specifically in regard to hearing preservation rates and speech recognition outcomes.…”