Objective detection of auditory brainstem responses using a bootstrap technique

Lv, Jing (2007) Objective detection of auditory brainstem responses using a bootstrap technique. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Record type: Thesis (Doctoral)

Abstract

Auditory Evoked Potentials (AEPs) measure the responses from the auditory nervous system structures following presentation of an acoustic stimulus (clicks or tone-burst). The aim of this work is to investigate new methods to objectively detect the responses.

A novel bootstrap technique was proposed, allowing the statistical significance (p-value) to be estimated for a wide range of different signal parameters, and detect the response in an easy and very flexible manner. The bootstrap method is based on randomly resampling (with replacement) the original data and gives an estimate of the probability that the response obtained is due to random variation in the data rather than a physiological response. Furthermore, the bootstrap technique provides a simple way to compare different methods for response detection using p-values.

A modified bootstrap method with three artefact rejection schemes was then proposed and they can efficiently eliminate the effect of stimulus and/or movement artefacts. This modification makes the bootstrap procedures more effective to deal with ‘real data’ from patients, where artefacts are often present.

The performance of the bootstrap method was evaluated on simulated signals by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis and compared with other methods. On data recorded from normal-hearing volunteers, the techniques provided similar hearing thresholds to those obtained by visual inspection of the auditory brainstem response (ABR). The flexibility of this approach allows the method to be used with a range of parameters, numbers of sweeps, and with user-defined false positive rates.

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