Abstract
Tinnitus is an auditory condition that causes humans to hear a sound anytime, anywhere. Chronic and refractory tinnitus is caused by an over synchronization of neurons. Sound has been applied as an alternative treatment to resynchronize neuronal activity. To date, various acoustic therapies have been proposed to treat tinnitus. However, the effect is not yet well understood. Therefore, the objective of this study is to establish an objective methodology using electroencephalography (EEG) signals to measure changes in attentional processes in patients with tinnitus treated with auditory discrimination therapy (ADT). To this aim, first, event-related (de-) synchronization (ERD/ERS) responses were mapped to extract the levels of synchronization related to the auditory recognition event. Second, the deep representations of the scalograms were extracted using a previously trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture (MobileNet v2). Third, the deep spectrum features corresponding to the study datasets were analyzed to investigate performance in terms of attention and memory changes. The results proved strong evidence of the feasibility of ADT to treat tinnitus, which is possibly due to attentional redirection.
Highlights
Tinnitus is the perception of sound in the absence of an external source [1]
The aim of this study was to establish an objective methodology based on EEG analysis to measure changes in attentional processes in tinnitus patients treated with auditory discrimination therapy (ADT)
A new methodology based on event-related desynchronization (ERD)/event-related synchronization (ERS) analysis and deep spectrum features extraction was successfully implemented to measure changes in attentional processes in tinnitus patients treated with ADT
Summary
Tinnitus is the perception of sound in the absence of an external source [1]. It affects between 5 and 15% of the world population [2]. Tinnitus can be perceived by people of all ages, either those with normal hearing or those with hearing loss [3]. Lenhardt classified tinnitus into objective and subjective [4]. Objective tinnitus is associated with peripheral vascular abnormalities detectable by stethoscopic inspection, whereas subjective tinnitus is determined as an acoustic perception merely experienced by the patient [5]. The tinnitus of interest for the present investigation is the subjective one
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