METHOD AND SYSTEM TO CONVEY THE WITHIN-CHANNEL FINE STRUCTURE WITH A COCHLEAR IMPLANT

摘要

The present invention provides a cochlear stimulation system (5) and method for capturing and translating fine time structure ("FTS") in incoming sounds and delivering this information spatially to the cochlea. The system comprises a FTS estimator/analyzer (135) and a current navigator (140). An embodiment of the method comprises analyzing the incoming sounds within a time-frequency band (121), extracting the slowly varying frequency components (110) and estimating the FTS to obtain a more precise dominant FTS component within a frequency band (125, 125'). After adding the fine time structure to the carrier to identify a precise dominant FTS component in each analysis frequency band (125, 125'), a stimulation current may be directed or "steered", using the concept of virtual electrodes, to the precise spatial location (place) on the cochlea that corresponds to the dominant FTS component. This process is simultaneously repeated for each stimulation channel and each FTS component.