What is the expected outcome of cochlear implant surgery? How do you know when an operation has been successful?
Most patients feel that their overall quality of life has improved after the cochlear implant. The patients who do the best after cochlear implant surgery have open-set speech understanding in lightly crowded rooms and use the phone without problems. It may take a few years to get to this level. We consider the implantation a success when the patient can control his own speech, recognize environmental sounds and correctly recognize speech sounds (i.e. vowel / consonant / closed set word / open set word / sentence recognition).
