Optimal Denoising of Brainstem Auditory Evoked Response (Baer) for Automatic Peak Identification and Brainstem Assessment
Arnaud E. Jacquin, Elvir Causevic, E. Roy John, Leslie S. Prichep · 2006
Brainstem auditory evoked responses (BAER) are transient signals embedded in the EEG recorded from scalp electrodes, when a subject is presented with a series of acoustic clicks. These signals typically have a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) well below -10 dB. The extraction of BAER signals from the EEG for the purpose of automatically computing features of interest from the BAER waveform(s) is described in this paper. These features are: 1) Presence of an actual BAER response (at least peak I), 2) Presence of peak V, 3) Inter-peak latency I-V. We propose to combine a signal-adaptive denoising technique based on complex wavelets with a signal quality metric referred to as the FSP variance ratio for quantitative evaluation of signal quality in order to optimally denoise BAER signals and perform reliable waveform analysis.