Cochlear implants (CIs) are devices capable of restoring hearing function in profoundly-deaf patients to an acceptable degree of performance. An essential processing step in any cochlear implant is frequency analysis, which is usually performed via banks of filters. Here, we simulate and test the suitability of different filters and filterbank architectures for CIs with respect to their performance in speech intelligibility. Four different filters were implemented in an established model of CI hearing, the tone-excited vocoder, namely: GTF (Gammatone Filter), DAPGF (Differentiated All-Pole GTF), OZGF (One-Zero GTF) and BUTF (Butterworth). Three filterbank parameters, the filter order ( N), the filter quality factor ( Q) and the number of channels ( Ch), and their combinations were tested using objective and subjective metrics. Simulation results show that all filters tested are suitable for CI implementation, but that the choice of Q and N parameter values is crucial. For most conditions, optimal ( N,Q) combinations were within few units away from the combination (2, 4).

Biosimulation researchers use a variety of models, tools and languages for capturing and processing different aspects of biological processes. However, current modeling methods do not capture the underlying semantics of the biosimulation models sufficiently to support building, reusing, composing and merging complex biosimulation models originating from diverse experiments. In this paper, we propose an ontology based and multi-layered biosimulation model to facilitate researchers to share, integrate and collaborate their knowledge bases at Web scale. In particular, we investigate the semantic biosimulation model under the context of the multi-scale finite element (FE) modelling of the inner-ear. The proposed ontology-based biosimulation model will provide a homogenized and standardized access to the shared, semantically integrated and harmonized datasets for clinical data (histological data, micro-CT images of the cochlea, pathological data) and inner ear FE simulation models. The work presented in this paper is analyzed and designed as part of the SIFEM EU project.