Authors:

Jax Patrick Marrone

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About Paper:

Current clinical hearing tests mainly assess hearing sensitivity, rendering them unable to detect damage to brain regions responsible for interpreting sounds. This causes many forms of hearing loss to be undiagnosed and untreated. Prior studies have shown that auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) to pure tone stimuli at varying frequencies can identify noise-induced brain damage and hearing loss. However, this method relies on manual threshold identification, allowing for subjectivity in result interpretation. The recording process for traditional ABRs is also time-consuming and labor-intensive, making it suboptimal for use in a clinical setting. This research aims to validate an alternative diagnostic stimulus, referred to as a piptrain, as a faster and more descriptive method of eliciting ABRs with a key focus on developing an automated threshold-detecting algorithm. Eight rodent subjects were exposed to small arms fire (SAF) like noise to induce hearing loss, and ABRs were measured over an 8-week period. The ABRs were collected in response to pure tone stimuli and piptrain stimuli (four 2 ms pure tone frequencies every 5 ms). The thresholds for pure tone ABRs and piptrains were manually determined and compared; 58% of thresholds were within 10 decibels of each other, supporting the piptrains as a diagnostic method. An algorithm for automatic piptrain threshold identification will be developed using template matching. Implementation of this diagnostic method will allow for timely identification of hearing damage, including variations of hidden hearing loss previously undetectable. Keywords: Central Auditory System; Hearing Loss; Auditory Brainstem Response; Noise Exposure; Hearing Threshold Detection

Source:

Purdue University / 2024

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Co-authors:

Jax Patrick Marrone