Computer recognition of brain stem auditory evoked potential wave V by a neural network

A neural network simulator was used for the recognition of the presence and location of the peak of wave V of the brain stem auditory evoked potential (BAEP) test. Waveforms selected from BAEPs performed in the last 4 years at the University of Pittsburgh Presbyterian University Hospital were digitized and sampled, and the resulting amplitudes were normalized. A training set was composed of the waveforms resulting from the stimulation of 50 ears. The normalized amplitudes were used as the initial activation values for the networks. The desired outputs (the target locations for wave V) were represented in the output layer by setting the output element, which corresponded to the target location and its immediate neighbors, to high activation levels, and all the remaining output units to zero activity. Two network architectures, differing only in the hidden unit layer, with 40 and 16 hidden units, respectively, were trained by using standard back-propagation. Several trials from different starting points were performed for each architecture. The best network, found after 60 epochs (3,000 presentations), was able to correctly identify 17 of 20 cases (85%) from a set of test cases that were independent from the training set.