How Can We Compare Cochlear Implant Systems across Manufacturers? A Scoping Review of Recent Literature

Electric stimulation via a cochlear implant (CI) enables people with severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss to regain speech understanding and music appreciation and, thus, allow them to actively engage in social life. Three main manufacturers (Cochlear(TM), MED-EL(TM), and Advanced Bionics(TM) “AB”) have been offering CI systems, thus challenging CI recipients and otolaryngologists with a difficult decision as currently no comprehensive overview or meta-analysis on performance outcomes following CI implantation is available. The main goals of this scoping review were to (1) map the literature on speech and music performance outcomes and to (2) find whether studies have performed outcome comparisons between devices of different manufacturers. To this end, a literature search was conducted to find studies that address speech and music outcomes in CI recipients. From a total of 1592 papers, 188 paper abstracts were analyzed and 147 articles were found suitable for an examination of full text. From these, 42 studies were included for synthesis. A total of 16 studies used the consonant-nucleus-consonant (CNC) word recognition test in quiet at 60 db SPL. We found that aside from technical comparisons, very few publications compared speech outcomes across manufacturers of CI systems. However, evidence suggests that these data are available in large CI centers in Germany and the US. Future studies should therefore leverage large data cohorts to perform such comparisons, which could provide critical evaluation criteria and assist both CI recipients and otolaryngologists to make informed performance-based decisions.