Informatica

Transient evoked otoacoustic emissions (TEOAEs) have been analyzed for objective assessment of hearing function and monitoring of the influence of noise exposure and ototoxic drugs. This paper presents a novel application of the Hilbert–Huang transform (HHT) for detection and time-frequency mapping of TEOAEs. Since the HHT does not distinguish between signal and noise, it is combined with ensemble correlation in order to extract signal information in intervals with correlated activity. High resolution time-frequency mapping could predict 30 dBHL, or higher hearing loss, at different audiological frequencies in 63–90% of the cases and normal hearing in 75–90% of the cases. The proposed method offers TEOAE time-frequency mapping by constraining the analysis to regions with high signal-to-noise ratios. The results suggest that the HHT is suitable for hearing loss detection at individual frequencies and characterization of the fine structures of TEOAEs.

This paper presents a new approach for human cataract automatical detection based on ultrasound signal processing. Two signal decomposition techniques, empirical mode decomposition and discrete wavelet transform are used in the presented method. Performance comparison of these two decomposition methods when applied to this specific ultrasound signal is given. Described method includes ultrasonic signal decomposition to enhance signal specific features and increase signal to noise ratio with the following decision rules based on adaptive thresholding. The resulting detection performance of the proposed method using empirical mode decomposition was better to compare to discrete wavelet transform and resulted in 70% correctly identified “healthy subject” cases and 82%, 97% and 100% correctly identified “cataract cases” in the incipience, immature and mature cataract subject groups, respectively. Discussion is given on the reasons of different results and the differences between the two used signal decomposition techniques.