On optimal aperiodic stimulation for brainstem auditory evoked potentials estimation

Our aim is to overcome the problem of the periodic stimulation that causes an overlapping in both the time and frequency domains between late evoked potentials (EPs) corresponding to the (i-1)th stimulus and the brainstem auditory evoked potential (BAEP) to be estimated corresponding to the i'th stimulus. In order to reduce the contributions of late EP fractions, two aperiodic stimulation modes are suggested. The first one needs only information about the late EP frequency band, which depends on the stimulation frequency. The second is optimal in the least squares sense and requires a-priori information on the late EP fractions' covariance matrix, which needs to be estimated. Results are then presented and compared with classical methods.