Perspective: Hippocampal theta rhythm as a potential vestibuloacoustic biomarker of anxiety.

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illnesses - afflicting 19% of Americans every year and 31% within their lifetimes - yet diagnoses remain based on symptom checklists because existing technologies have yet to produce biomarkers sufficiently robust for clinical use. Some techniques provide superior spatial resolution of deep brain regions implicated in anxiety but have poor time resolution; while others measure signals in real time but lack spatial resolution. Often, the goal of probing deep brain regions in humans for anxiety research is to measure a putative analogue of a mammalian brain rhythm linked to behaviour that is suggestive of anxiety.

Investigation of a New Weighted Averaging Method to Improve SNR of Electrocochleography Recordings.

Goal: The aim of this study was to investigate methods to improve signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of extratympanic electrocochleography (ET-ECOG); a low SNR electrophysiological measurement technique. The current standard for ET-ECOG involves acquiring and uniform averaging ∼1000 evoked responses to reveal the signal of interest. Weighted averaging is commonly employed to enhance SNR of repetitive signals in the presence of a nonstationary noise, yet its efficacy in ET-ECOG has not been explored to date, which was the focus of this study.