Patient-Level Modeling of Ménière's Disease vs. Vestibular Migraine: Performance of Speech Discrimination and...

Background: Differentiating Ménière's disease (MD) from vestibular migraine (VM) remains difficult because current diagnostic frameworks are predominantly clinical and incorporate pure-tone thresholds, risking incorporation bias. We asked whether speech discrimination scores (SDS) alone can separate MD from VM at the patient level and whether adding a prespecified vestibular marker, the caloric-vHIT dissociation, pattern A (abnormal calorics with normal horizontal vHIT), improves performance. Methods: In a retrospective cohort (2015-2018) including definite MD (n = 60) and definite VM (n = 40) by Bárány/ICHD criteria, we trained patient-level logistic regression models with 5-fold out-of-fold validation and in-fold preprocessing. To avoid incorporation bias, PTA was excluded from all models. Predefined feature sets were as follows: (1) SDS-only (bilateral SDS), (2) CalHiT-A-only (Yes/No; canal paresis ≥22% with horizontal-canal vHIT gain ≥0.80 in either ear), and (3) SDS+CalHiT-A. Discrimination was assessed by ROC-AUC with bootstrap 95% CIs; calibration and decision-curve analysis (DCA) are reported. An exploratory model encoded SDS as "affected/healthy." Results: The SDS-only model achieved AUC 0.866 (95% CI 0.787-0.937). CalHiT-A-only yielded AUC 0.674 (0.561-0.778). Adding CalHiT-A to SDS did not improve discrimination (SDS+CalHiT-A AUC 0.844 [0.760-0.913]). The exploratory "affected/healthy" SDS encoding underperformed (AUC 0.801 [0.706-0.882]). CalHiT-A was significantly more prevalent in MD than in VM (56.7% [34/60] vs. 17.5% [7/40]; Fisher's exact p = 1.49 × 10^-4). Calibration favored SDS-only, and DCA showed the highest net benefit for SDS-only across thresholds p = 0.05-0.40. Conclusions: Bilateral SDS alone provides robust, well-calibrated discrimination between MD and VM and outperforms CalHiT-A and the affected/healthy SDS encoding. In this cohort, vestibular test dissociation did not add diagnostic value beyond SDS at the patient level, supporting SDS-centered diagnostic workflows while reserving CalHiT-A for adjudication and phenotyping rather than primary classification.