gms | German Medical Science

In the perspective of developing an audiological diagnostic supporting tool to be used in clinical audiology to support ENT specialists with statistical information from a large number of patient cases, the Common Audiological Functional Parameters (CAFPAs) were recently introduced [1]. These parameters act as a compact representation of audiological measurement outcomes which is independent of the exact choice of tests, and aims at integrating data of different test batteries used in different clinics. The set of CAFPAs was designed to cover all known relevant functional aspects to comprehensively characterise the human auditory system.

Classification performance was evaluated using a data set containing audiological measurements, CAFPAs, and labels from experts for audiological findings and treatment recommendations for single patient cases. The measurements included for example pure-tone audiogram, speech tests, and some cognitive measures. As audiological findings, cochlear, conductive, or central hearing loss was given as options to choose from. For treatment recommendations, the options were cochlear or middle-ear implant, and different types of hearing aids.

Training distributions for statistical models were estimated for clinically revelant comparison sets of two categories (e.g., normal hearing vs. hearing impaired). The evaluation was performed with a leave-one-out cross-validation. First, the classification performance was assessed by calculating sensitivity and specificity for each audiological measurement (and for each measurement parameter, e.g. frequency in the audiogram) as well as for each CAFPA separately. The classification performance for combinations of audiological measurements (as available in clinical practice) was compared to the performance of the complete set of CAFPAs.

The results show that a comparable classification performance in terms of sensitivity and specificity was achieved. With a simple statistical modelling and classification approach the CAFPAs were found to be similarly suitable for the considered audiological classification tasks. Thereby, an important prerequisite for the further development of an audiological diagnostic supporting tool based on CAFPAs was fulfilled. Hence, the CAFPAs might serve as an intermediate layer between audiological measurements and audiological findings or treatment recommendations to be included in such a tool.