Research Project
7061893
[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The ability to objectively assess the health of the human auditory system is important for applications such as newborn hearing screening. The early identification of children with hearing impairment is an important public health objective in this country. 1 of the techniques to obtain objective information about the health of the auditory nervous system is the measurement of the steady state auditory evoked potentials (SSAEPs). Current techniques of estimation of evoked potentials require extremely long strings of data in order to mitigate the effect of background noise. The required long measurement time is the main technical obstacle in the widespread adoption of evoked potential measurement in clinical tests. A novel signal processing technique of fast estimation of SSAEPs is proposed. The proposed technique is based on a new nonlinear adaptive signal processing method that has shown a great promise in fast extraction of weak signals buried under large amounts of noise. Its successful application to fast estimation of otoacoustic emissions is an example of its potential. The results of the preliminary studies conducted using simulated as well as real clinical data show the great potential of the proposed technique for fast estimation of the SSAEP signals as well. The aim of this research project is to fully develop the proposed technique and evaluate its clinical viability in rapid hearing assessment using SSAEP tests. More specifically, it is an objective of the proposed research to design and optimize the proposed signal processing technique, and evaluate its functionality on a set of clinical data recorded on 58 subjects, which has already been made available for this project through collaborations with 1 of the major Canadian hearing research centers. The signal processing design effort involves architectural design, parameter tuning and performance testing using real and simulated data. It is another objective of this project to implement a research prototype of a SSAEP measurement device, and test its performance in clinical environments. The engineering development phase includes implementation of the proposed SSAEP estimation technique on a digital hardware system while the clinical component of this effort involves a functionality test of the system by conducting clinical tests on a subject population of at least 30 infants. The feasibility of the technology and its clinical potential will be studied by testing its functionality on the data collected in various situations arising in practice. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]
