Ultra-fast quantification of hearing loss by neural synchronization stabilities of auditory evoked brainstem activity

Recently, we proposed a new novelty detection paradigm for the fast detection of hearing thresholds using single sweeps of auditory evoked potentials as efficient approach to newborn hearing screening. Such a method might prevent currently used time consuming averaging procedures which require the state of spontaneous sleep, sedation, or narcosis of the newborns when using such systems in universal newborn hearing screening programs. In this study, we present an evaluation of new feature for such novelty detection schemes, namely the synchronization stability of auditory evoked brainstem activity. For this, large-scale correlates of the neural group synchronization at the brainstem for stimulation levels above the hearing threshold are detected as novel event. This novelty detection paradigm allows for the adaptive inclusion of individual measurement conditions using the spontaneous EEG. For the individual patient, at the challenging stimulation level of 30dB(HL) the synchronization stability allowed the discrimination of stimulated from the non-stimulated condition in a fraction of time of conventional devices. It is concluded that the proposed feature following the novelty detection paradigm might be used for the ultra-fast detection of hearing thresholds and is thus ideally suited for the use in efficient universal hearing screening programs.