A Pilot Study on Auditory Brainstem Response Evoked with Randomized Stimulation Rate

Comparing with pure tone audiometry which is recognized as the gold standard in clinical hearing assessments, auditory brainstem response (ABR) that is a kind of electric brain activity evoked by acoustic stimuli can achieve objective hearing screening without the needs of patients' response. However, the traditionally used click approach generates relatively poor ABR waveforms for high stimulation rates, due to the contamination of the auditory evoked potentials (AEP) during the averaging of epochs. To resolve this issue, this study proposed a randomized stimulate rate (RSR) method to mitigate interferences from AEP via the introduction of a random interval between two consecutive stimuli. The performance of the method was compared with the commonly used fixed-rate method and the swept tone method. Results showed that the ABR waveform of the proposed method was rather consistent with that of the commonly applied fixed-rate click method for low stimulation rate, but showed significantly better waveform differentiation for high stimulation rate. Moreover, the proposed RSR method showed comparable performance when compared with the swept tone method under different stimulus levels. The findings of this study would potentially improve the reliability of the existing methods to aid a more accurate hearing loss screening and diagnosis.