Engineering Commons^™

Improving Pure-Tone Audiometry Using Probabilistic Machine Learning Classification, Xinyu Song

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Hearing loss is a critical public health concern, affecting hundreds millions of people worldwide and dramatically impacting quality of life for affected individuals. While treatment techniques have evolved in recent years, methods for assessing hearing ability have remained relatively unchanged for decades. The standard clinical procedure is the modified Hughson-Westlake procedure, an adaptive pure-tone detection task that is typically performed manually by audiologists, costing millions of collective hours annually among healthcare professionals. In addition to the high burden of labor, the technique provides limited detail about an individual’s hearing ability, estimating only detection thresholds at a handful of pre-defined pure-tone …

Determinants Of Hearing Loss In Perforations Of The Tympanic Membrane, Ritvik P. Mehta, John J. Rosowski, Susan E. Voss, Ellen O'Neil, Saumil N. Merchant

Engineering: Faculty Publications

Background: Although tympanic membrane perforations are common, there have been few systematic studies of the structural features determining the magnitude of the resulting conductive hearing loss. Our recent experimental and modeling studies predicted that the conductive hearing loss will increase with increasing perforation size, be independent of perforation location (contrary to popular otologic belief), and increase with decreasing size of the middle-ear and mastoid air space (an idea new to otology).

Objective: To test our predictions regarding determinants of conductive hearing loss in tympanic membrane perforations against clinical data gathered from patients.

Study Design: Prospective clinical study. Setting: Tertiary …