Identification of auditory brainstem responses

Auditory brainstem evoked responses are routinely used in audiology and otoneurology. An automatic method can be used to roughly classify the responses into probably normal, probably abnormal, and uncertain cases. Interpretation of the auditory brainstem response is a multistage process. Essential tasks are to detect individual peaks in the waveform and to choose representatives examples as medically interesting Jewett components. Our method is based on the comparison of detected peaks and normal values by means of an evaluation function, choosing representatives so that the values of this function will be maximized. We have studied the effects of some evaluation functions on the ability to correctly classify an evoked response. It turns out that the choice of an appropriate evaluation function is crucial in some problematic cases.