The pathogenesis of tinnitus involves multiple hierarchical levels of auditory processing and appraisal of sensory saliency. Early tinnitus onset is most likely attributed to homeostatic plasticity in the periphery, while the chronification and decompensation are tightly linked to brain areas for the allocation of attentional resources, such as e.g., the thalamocortical feedback loops and the limbic system. Increased spontaneous firing after sensory deafferentation might be sufficient to generate a phantom perception, yet the question why not every peripheral hearing loss automatically elicits a tinnitus sensation is still to be addressed. Utilizing quantitative modeling of multiple hierarchical levels in the auditory pathway, we demonstrate the effects of lateral inhibition on increased spontaneous firing and the resulting elevation of firing regularity and synchronization of neural activity. The presented therapeutical approach is based on the idea of disrupting the heightened regularity of the neural population response in the tinnitus frequency range. This neural activity regularity depends on lateral dispersion of common noise and thus is susceptible for edge effects and might be influenced by a change in neural activity in bordering frequency ranges by fitted acoustical stimulation. We propose the use of patient specifically adapted tailor-made notched acoustic stimulation, utilizing modeling results for the optimal adjustment of the stimulation frequencies to archive a therapeutical edge-effect.

Early tinnitus onset is most likely attributed to an increased spontaneous activity caused by homeostatic plasticity effects in the peripheral auditory system. In a recent modeling study we demonstrated the effects of lateral inhibition on firing regularity related to an increased spontaneous activity. We found that increased activity causes the interconnected neurons to fire more regularly and synchronized. We hypothesized that a suppression of this orchestrated neural activity could be the physiological background of the tailor-made notched acoustic stimulation treatment as proposed by Okamoto and Pantev. In this article we want to highlight this neural activity alignment in the early stages of acoustic processing and examine the effects of different bandwiths of hearing loss and notched stimulation on the increased firing rate. We utilized a computation model of the dorsal cochlear nucleus by Zheng and Voigt with a modified input representing a hearing deficit and tinnitus as well as a notched acoustic stimulation. In-silico results show that the suppression of firing regularity in the frequencyrange of the simulated tinnitus strongly depends on the relationship of the two bandwidths of the hearing deficit and the notched acoustic stimulation. The modulation of neural firing behaviour is thus strongly affected by edge effects, such as lateral inhibition bandwith or the slope of diminished neural excitation due to hearing deficit or stimulus notching.