Electromotive Triggering and Single Sweep Analysis of Vestibular Evoked Myogenic Potentials (VEMPs)

Cervical (c) and ocular (o) vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (VEMPs) provide important tools for measuring otolith function. However, two major drawbacks of this method are encountered in clinical practice. First, recording of oVEMPs is compromised by small n10 amplitudes. Second, VEMP analysis is currently based on the averaging technique, resulting in a loss of information compared to single sweep analysis. Here, we: 1) developed a novel electromotive trigger mechanism for evoking VEMPs by bone-conducted vibration to the forehead and 2) established maximum entropy extraction of complex wavelet transforms for calculation of phase synchronization between VEMP single sweeps. Both c- and oVEMPs were recorded for n=10 healthy individuals. The oVEMP n10 amplitude was consistently higher (right: 24.84±9.71 μV; left: 27.40±14.55 μV) than previously described. Stable VEMP signals were reached after a smaller number of head taps (oVEMPs 6; cVEMPs 11) compared to current recommendations. Phase synchronization vectors and phase shift values were successfully determined for simulated and clinically recorded VEMPs, providing information about the impact of noise and phase jitter on the VEMP signal. Thus, the proposed method constitutes an easy-to-use approach for the fast detection and analysis of VEMPs in clinical practice.