Correlation Analysis of EEG Brain Network With Modulated Acoustic Stimulation for Chronic Tinnitus Patients.

Xiabing Zhang,Min Ao,Yuanlin Jiang,Peng Xu,Yong Zhao,Dezhong Yao,Gang He,Changfu Pei,Fali Li,Shu Zhang

doi:10.1109/tnsre.2020.3039555

Abstract

The acoustic stimulation influences of the brain is still unveiled, especially from the brain network point, which can reveal how interaction is propagated and integrated between different brain zones for chronic tinnitus patients. We specifically designed a paradigm to record the electroencephalograms (EEGs) for tinnitus patients when they were treated with consecutive acoustic stimulation neuromodulation therapy for up to 75 days, using the tinnitus handicap inventory (THI) to evaluate the tinnitus severity or the acoustic stimulation treatment efficacy, and the EEG to record the brain activities every 2 weeks. Then, we used an EEG-based coherence analysis to investigate if the changes in brain network consistent with the clinical outcomes can be observed during 75-days acoustic treatment. Finally, correlation analysis was conducted to study potential relationships between network properties and tinnitus handicap inventory score change. The EEG network became significantly weaker after long-term periodic acoustic stimulation treatment, and tinnitus handicap inventory score changes or the acoustic stimulation treatment efficacy are strongly correlated with the varying brain network properties. Long-term acoustic stimulation neuromodulation intervention can improve the rehabilitation of chronic tinnitus patients, and the EEG network provides a relatively reliable and quantitative analysis approach for objective evaluation of tinnitus clinical diagnosis and treatment.

Highlights

T INNITUS is an auditory phantom percept with a tone, hissing, or buzzing sound in the absence of any objective physical sound source [1]
Since tinnitus severity is a composite of several behavioral measures or aspects of tinnitus perception, it is meant to divide tinnitus degree by the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory (THI), which classifies patients into 5 grades on a 100-point scale using a 25-item questionnaire, from slight (0-16), mild (18-36), moderate (38-56), severe (58-76) to catastrophic (78-100) [10]
In this work, considering that tinnitus involves multiple brain zones and the disorder may be reflected from the connectivity patterns of the brain, we used the weighted EEG function networks that can reflect the couplings among brain zones to investigate if the acoustic stimulation neuromodulation could improve the impaired brain networks during a relatively long-term stimulation

Summary

Introduction

T INNITUS is an auditory phantom percept with a tone, hissing, or buzzing sound in the absence of any objective physical sound source [1]. Most chronic tinnitus is triggered by central origin, and acoustic therapies can adequately stimulate the auditory pathway of tinnitus [5], [6]. Many studies have shown aberrant neural activity within the central auditory pathway of tinnitus patients [7], [8]. Tinnitus is a frequent and heterogeneous disorder, resulting in most cases from neuronal changes occurring in the central nervous system as a reaction to auditory deprivation [9]. Acoustic stimulation is one of the most relevant tinnitus therapies and helps relieve the painful feeling of chronic tinnitus [14]. Though the THI scale is widely used to evaluate the tinnitus degree of patients, it is largely influenced by the patient’s subjective judgment, and the reliable metrics to objectively evaluate the tinnitus recovery degree is still lacked, which is mainly due

Methods

Results

Conclusion