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Updated: Aug 8, 2025
Morphological and Functional Evaluation of Ribbon Synapses at Specific Frequency Regions of the Mouse Cochlea
Published on: May 10, 2019
Isolating auditory-nerve contributions to electrocochleography by high-pass filtering: A better biomarker for
Viacheslav Vasilkov1, M Charles Liberman1, Stéphane F Maison1
1Eaton-Peabody Laboratories, Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Department of Otolaryngology -Head and Neck Surgery, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachussetts 02114, USA viacheslav.vasilkov@meei.harvard.edu; charles_liberman@meei.harvard.edu; stephane_maison@meei.harvard.edu.
Abstract:
In search of biomarkers for cochlear neural degeneration (CND) in electrocochleography from humans with normal thresholds, we high-pass and low-pass filtered the responses to separate contributions of auditory-nerve action potentials (N1) from hair-cell summating potentials (SP). The new N1 measure is better correlated with performance on difficult word-recognition tasks used as a proxy for CND. Furthermore, the paradoxical correlation between larger SPs and worse word scores, observed with classic electrocochleographic analysis, disappears with the new metric. Classic SP is simultaneous with and opposite in phase to an early neural contribution, and filtering separates the sources to eliminate this interference.
