A Correlational Analysis between Audiometric Pure-tone Averages and Distortion Product Otoacoustic Emissions

Hearing loss severely affects human speech communication and the quality of life, and efficient hearing screening can help hearing function diagnosis and subsequent hearing rehabilitation. Pure-tone audiometry test and distortion-product otoacoustic emission (DPOAE) measurement are two commonly-used clinical techniques for hearing loss diagnosis, and they were developed based on different mechanisms in a hearing process. Early work investigated the relation between audiometric thresholds and DPOAE measurements. The present work aimed to use a simple linear fitting to estimate audiometric pure-tone threshold averages (PTAs) from DPOAE signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) measurements, i.e., DPOAE amplitude minus the mean noise floor. Audiometric PTA values and DPOAE SNRs were measured from both ears of 30 listeners with normal hearing or mild-to-moderate hearing loss. The DPOAE SNR measurements of 4 distortion products (i.e., 2fl-f2= 1, 2, 4 and 8 kHz) were combined with a linear prediction model, and correlated with the PTA values. Data analysis showed moderate high correlation coefficients (i.e., r=0.84 and 0.64) for the left and right ears, respectively. The results of the present work demonstrate the possibility to estimate the behavioral audiometric PTA values from the objective DPOAE SNR measurements for hearing loss diagnosis.