Preliminary processing and detection of characteristic features of Brainstem Auditory Evoked Potentials (BAEP)

The brainstem auditory evoked potentials (BAEP) provide an objective, electrophysiological diagnostic method, widely applied in examinations of auditory organs, in particular for such cases, when the application of traditional audiometric methods is difficult or impossible, e.g. in examination of little children and infants. The shape of the time-dependent signal, and its possible distortion, and particularly the presence or absence of characteristic waves are of great diagnostic importance. In the present work methods of preliminary processing and automated identification of wave V are presented, using the self-organizing map (SOM) type neural networks for determination of the structure of the feature space and classification.