Kalman filter for ABR signal analysis

Abstract

Auditory brainstem response (ABR) is an electrophysiological response in the electroencephalogram (EEG) reading which generated by the brainstem in response to auditory stimulus.ABR is very useful in determination of hearing threshold especially for uncooperative subject's and newborn infants.However, due to several factors, particularly on the technical aspects, including noise interference and other brain activities, the screening consumes a large portion of time to obtain the meaningful result.Conventional method to retrieve the underlying wave V using averaging technique requires more trials.Because of this, screening cannot be performed in a large scale.Based on this issue, this paper purposes a method for ABR denoising and detection of wave V by using Kalman Filter.This technique estimates the potential being analyzed sequentially by referring the previous sweeps information.By implementing this technique, the unwanted signal can be filtered out from every sweeps of ABR recorded.The system has been tested on 20 normal adult subjects with no history of hearing impairment.The ABR signal is collected using high accuracy biosignal data acquisition and processing system (high-end 24 bit biosignal amplifier, gUSBamp, gTec, Austria).From the analyzed result, wave V can be detected by less number of sweeps and still preserving the morphology of ABR signal.This approach shows better capability of estimating ABR signal by detecting wave V in minimum number of sweeps compared to conventional averaging technique.Therefore, our results show that the time of recording can be reduced for each screening.