Onze beursstudenten

Dokter Federico LUCHETTI

Project

Development of the Frequency-Following Response as a tool for diagnosing and qualifying Hearing Loss and Speech Retardation

Project supervisor

Labo of hospitaal waar het project plaatsvindt

Brugmann HUDERF; Laboratory of Sensory and Cognitive Neurophysiology.

Objectives of research

• Develop and integrate within a single biomedical system(Tucker-Davis RZ6) the necessary software tools for stimulation, recording and performing real time analysis of the Frequency-Following Response FFR.
• Preliminary results already indicate how the FFR could be useful to assess some cases of child patients with Auditory Neuropathy Spectrum Disorder, a particular focus will be given to the latter by evaluating selected patients groups in order to improve our understanding of the FFR components and to demonstrate the added values of FFR data.
• Particular focus will be given to the understanding of the generation sites andmechanisms underlying the sources of the FFR by studying selected pathological cases and guided by results of genetic studies giving rise to those particular electro-physiological profiles
• An extensive literature review coupled with an auditory computational model will help to formand illustrate hypothesis.

Interest for child health
Hearing Loss is the most frequent congenital deficit. The importance of initiating an adequate remediation without delay is now undisputed. The recent recognition of the role of supra-threshold deficits in the handicap of hearing impaired subjects asks for more systematic evaluations of this component which by nature cannot be investigated psycho-acoustically in pre-lingual children. This research is a first step towards the development of an objective method prone to indicate supra-thresholds deficits and guide the development of appropriate remediation techniques. The project will also evaluate the hypothesis that a more detailed description of the electrophysiological phenotype can contribute to improved genetic testing strategy in some cases. It is for cases with known molecular deficits that foreseeable gene therapy strategies are likely to have a major impact in the next decades. At least 10 different patterns of abnormal FFR have been noticed in our data, obtained in different forms of speech delay accompanied by autistic traits but without hearing loss. This finding must first be confirmed on more subjects.