[Wavelet application to reduction of stimulus artifact in transient evoked otoacoustic emissions testing]

Otoacoustic emissions(OAEs) are presently considered as an objective clinical test for assessing the integraity of peripheral hearing. Owing to the adding of the reflex waves of the stimuli, recordings of emissions evoked in response to transient stimuli are contaminated by an initial artifact, which inhibits the examination of high frequency cochlear responses that have short latencies. So OAEs testing is of serious limitation in most clinical environments. We propose an artifact reduction technique based on discrete wavelet transform pre-processing method and demonstrate empirically that the method not only improves artifact reduction but also enhances signal-to-noise ratio in the response region.