Developing a Behavioral Assay for Tinnitus Characterization

Abstract

Tinnitus– affecting ~50 million Americans– is hard to characterize because of its diverse manifestations, which hinder treatment efficacy. Our goal was to further develop a pre-clinical tinnitus characterization assay using reverse correlation, where patients render subjective perceptions from random stimuli. We evaluated stimulus generation methods: an area identified for refinement. The most accurate characterizations came from the Brimijoin Gaussian Smoothed method; 8 segments on a frequency spectrum are systematically filled with a Gaussian-shaped power distribution. This showed statistically significant improvement and had the most positive subjective feedback. In the future, this research may be incorporated into a clinical setting to improve tinnitus treatment via characterization