Faculty Collaboration Database

Response of the auditory nerve to sinusoidal electrical stimulation: effects of high-rate pulse trains. Hear Res 2004 Aug;194(1-2):1-13

Date

07/28/2004

Pubmed ID

15276671

DOI

10.1016/j.heares.2004.03.020

Scopus ID

2-s2.0-3342996932 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site)   15 Citations

Abstract

Electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve produces highly synchronized responses. As a consequence, electrical stimulation may result in a narrow dynamic range of hearing and poor temporal representation of an input signal. The electrically evoked compound action potential (ECAP) is an electrophysiologic response used for neural assessment in individuals with auditory prostheses. Because the ECAP arises from the activity of a population of auditory nerve fibers, within- and across-fiber synchrony should be evident in the responses. Due to its clinical relevance and reflection of neural response properties, the ECAP is used in the present study to examine changes in neural synchrony. Empirical and modeled single-fiber data indicate that stimulation with electrical pulses of a sufficiently high rate may induce stochastic neural response behaviors. This study investigated the effects of adding high-rate conditioning pulses (5000 pps) on the ECAP in response to 100 Hz electrical sinusoids. The results showed that high-rate conditioning pulses increased response amplitudes at low sinusoidal levels and decreased the amplitudes at high sinusoidal levels, indicating a decrease in the slope of the ECAP growth functions to sinusoidal stimuli. The results are consistent with a hypothesis that high-rate conditioning pulses increase single-fiber relative spread (RS) in response to sinusoidal stimuli, and the effect is highly dependent on the level of the high-rate conditioning pulses.

Author List

Runge-Samuelson CL, Abbas PJ, Rubinstein JT, Miller CA, Robinson BK

Author

Christina Runge PhD Associate Provost, Chief, Professor in the Otolaryngology department at Medical College of Wisconsin

MESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold

Action Potentials
Animals
Auditory Perception
Cats
Cochlear Implants
Cochlear Nerve
Deafness
Electric Stimulation
Guinea Pigs
Time Factors