Acoustic tumor detection using stacked derived-band ABR amplitude

摘要

A diagnostic procedure first records a patient's auditory brainstem response (ABR) to each of a plurality of auditory stimuli. The stimuli comprise 60 dB nHL clicks using high pass noise masking procedures to isolate the cochlear response within specific frequency bands. These derived band ABRs are temporally shifted to align the wave V peak amplitudes. The time-shifted responses are then summed to create the stacked ABR. The stacked wave V ABR amplitude is compared to a threshold value. The stacked wave V ABR amplitudes for patients having small (less than or equal to 1 cm.) intracanalicular tumors are measurably lower than those for otherwise similar individuals without tumors.