Auditory stimuli and response analysis toolbox

NU 2011-009

Inventors

Nina Kraus*

Trent G. Nicol

Erika E. Skoe

Abstract

Northwestern researchers have developed a variety of advanced digital signal processing techniques (DSP) for the analysis of complex auditory brain responses (cABR) in order to assess the integrity of the auditory pathway. How the nervous system processes complex sounds needs to be understood, in order to improve hearing sensitivity measurements, detection of neural pathologies and assessment of audio devices. Until now the measurement of brainstem responses to auditory stimuli has been confined to simple analysis using click and tone stimuli. This limits the ability to study how the nervous system processes complex sounds and soundscapes. The invention is a toolkit comprised of two parts. The first is a library of complex auditory stimuli, which includes multiple syllables in different intonations and musical sounds from different instruments. The second is a collection of DSP routines that support the complex analysis of and additional collection of auditory stimuli. The cABR toolkit is the first of its kind, allowing flexible, user-defined, advanced analyses of responses to complex auditory stimuli. There are a number of systems on the market that can be used to collect evoked potentials originating from the brainstem. However, none have the built-in capacity to record and analyze cABRs in such a sophisticated and streamlined manner.

Applications