Role of the kurtosis metric in evaluating hearing trauma from complex noise exposures—From animal experiments to human applications

A number of animal experiments and epidemiologic studies in humans have demonstrated that current noise standard underestimated hearing trauma by complex noise. While energy and exposure duration are necessary metrics they are not sufficient to evaluate the hearing hazard from complex noise exposure. The temporal distribution of energy is an important factor in evaluating NIHL. Kurtosis incorporates in a single metric all the temporal variables known to affect hearing (i.e., peak, inter-peak interval, and transient duration histogram) that makes kurtosis as one of the candidate metrics. Our previous animal studies show that both kurtosis and energy are necessary to evaluate the hazard posed to hearing by a complex noise exposure. In this study, we focus on how to use the knowledge from animal model into humans. Methods are presented to solve the following questions: (1) How to calculate the kurtosis? (2) What is the relation between kurtosis and the hearing trauma? (3) How to extract a single number from ...