Analysis of click-evoked otoacoustic emissions by concentration of frequency and time: Preliminary results from normal hearing and Ménière's disease ears

The presence of click-evoked (CE) otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) has been clinically accepted as an indicator of normal cochlear processing of sounds. For treatment and diagnostic purposes, however, clinicians do not typically pay attention to the detailed spectrum and waveform of CEOAEs. A possible reason is due to the lack of noise-robust signal processing tools to estimate physiologically meaningful time-frequency properties of CEOAEs, such as the latency of spectral components. In this on-going study, we applied a modern tool called concentration of frequency and time (ConceFT, [1]) to analyze CEOAE waveforms. Randomly combined orthogonal functions are used as windowing functions for time-frequency analysis. The resulting spectrograms are subject to nonlinear time-frequency reassignment so as to enhance the concentration of time-varying sinusoidal components. The results after reassignment could be further averaged across the random choice of windows. CEOAE waveforms are acquired by a linear averaging paradigm, and longitudinal data are currently being collected from patients with Meniere’s disease (MD) and a control group of normal hearing subjects. When CEOAE is present, the ConceFT plots show traces of decreasing but fluctuating instantaneous frequency against time. For comparison purposes, same processing methods are also applied to analyze CEOAE data from cochlear mechanics simulation.