Cross-species characterization of joint otoacoustic emission profiles in sensorineural hearing loss

Abstract

Current clinical assessment of otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) is typically limited to presence or absence of emissions to detect hearing loss, but recent work suggests advanced analyses and data collection methods have the potential to improve the diagnostic utility of OAEs. OAEs arise from two distinct mechanisms, nonlinear distortion and linear reflection, which are both sensitive to the health of outer hair cells but may reflect separate aspects of cochlear mechanical function. Joint distortion-reflection OAE profiles offer a non-invasive characterization of peripheral auditory physiology and dysfunction (Abdala and Kalluri, 2017). In this study, swept-tone distortion-product OAEs were separated into distortion and reflection components. Swept-tone stimulus-frequency OAEs, reflection-type emissions, were measured using a suppressor paradigm. Joint OAE profiles will be estimated for multiple pre-clinical chinchilla models of sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) and in humans with either normal hearing or sensorineural hearing loss. In chinchillas, we expect SNHL models with distinct profiles of cochlear damage to yield separable joint OAE profiles. Findings in chinchillas will provide mechanistic insight into OAE profile clusters in humans. These data test the sensitivity of joint OAE profiles to specific cochlear dysfunctions and contribute to development of precision diagnostics for SNHL.