An advanced cochlear echo test technique has been specially developed to tackle some specific problems associated with measurements from infants. The test procedure and data processing combination has greatly improved noise immunity and has given very reliable results on poorly co-operating children. Technical details are given and the results of a study of 105 ears from 55 children are presented. The potential of the advanced technique as a screening test is discussed.
Objective: In this study, we propose an automatic diagnostic algorithm for detecting otitis media based on wideband tympanometry measurements. Methods: We develop a convolutional neural network for classification of otitis media based on the analysis of the wideband tympanogram. Saliency maps are computed to gain insight into the decision process of the convolutional neural network. Finally, we attempt to distinguish between otitis media with effusion and acute otitis media, a clinical subclassification important for the choice of treatment. Results: The approach shows high performance on the overall otitis media detection with an accuracy of 92.6%. However, the approach is not able to distinguish between specific types of otitis media. Conclusion: Out approach can detect otitis media with high accuracy and the wideband tympanogram holds more diagnostic information than the commonly used techniques wideband absorbance measurements and simple tympanograms. Significance: This study shows how advanced deep learning methods enable automatic diagnosis of otitis media based on wideband tympanometry measurements, which could become a valuable diagnostic tool.
No clinically relevant predictive relationship between distortion product otoacoustic emission amplitude and pure tone audiometry threshold was apparent. These results do not support the replacement of pure tone audiometry with distortion product otoacoustic emissions in screening. Distortion product otoacoustic emissions at frequencies associated with elevated pure tone audiometry thresholds are evidence of intact outer hair cell function, suggesting that sites distinct from these contribute to auditory deficit following ototrauma.
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