Optimizing the analysis of auditory event-related potentials in EEG (with Erasmus Medical Center)

Last year the Sophia Children’s Hospital has opened the Child Brain Center to provide the best care for children with a brain or developmental disorder. Different departments and disciplines work together to provide optimal care for those with challenging neurodevelopmental issues. The Child Brain Lab is the research part of this center, where children from 0-18 years old undergo various tests in a playful way to better understand the brain and their disorder. Data are used to facilitate clinical care and to establish developmental growth curves, thereby providing a solid infrastructure for evaluating new techniques and interventions. Measurements are repeated every 3 years to capture longitudinal data of these children. The ENT department is one of the disciplines involved in the Child Brain Lab. Our research is focused on the relation between hearing, language and brain development. More specifically, our research question is whether we can predict variation in neurodevelopment from auditory event-related potentials (ERPs). To answer this question we include tests to measure peripheral hearing and cortical responses to sound, also called auditory ERPs. Up till now, we have performed pilots studies to optimize our protocol for measuring auditory ERPs. Data-analysis has thus far been done by using EEGLAB, where we look at the amplitude and latency of ERP components. However, the data-analysis pipeline could be improved to obtain more clear ERP data, being able to detect small differences between a disease and control group. Furthermore, alternative methods could be explored to analyze the auditory ERPs and ultimately answer our research question.

Assignment

Therefore possible projects could be to 1) optimize the pre-processing of the ERP data, like the artifact detection scheme, or 2) investigate methods to analyze the ERP data.

Requirements

From TUDelft side, supervision will be carried out by Bori Hunyadi and Richard C. Hendriks. The assignment requires regular visits of the EMC in Rotterdam.

Contact

Last modified: 2022-02-23