Finding physiological responses in vestibular evoked potentials

Abstract

Vestibular prostheses are regarded as a promising tool to restore lost sensation in patients with vestibular disorders. These prostheses often electrically stimulate the vestibular nerve and stimulation efficacy is evaluated by measuring the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR). However, eye movement recording as intuitive metric of vestibular functionality is difficult to obtain outside the laboratory environment, and hence not available as an error signal in a closed-loop prosthesis. Recently we investigated vestibular evoked potentials (VEPs) by stimulating and recording in the same semicircular canal of a guinea pig. Here we studied the correlation between VOR and one region of VEP. We further analyzed a second portion of VEP, where vestibular nerve activity should occur using rectified bin integration (RBI). To this end, stimulation artifact was significantly reduced by hardware and software approaches. We found a high VEP-VOR correlation (R-squared=0.86), suggesting that VEP could substitute VOR as metric of vestibular function. Differences between below and above vestibular threshold stimulation were seen for the second portion of VEP. Further investigations are required to determine the specific parts of VEP that accurately represents vestibular function(s).