Biomedical Signal Processing / Medical Signal Processing / Biosignal Processing
Farzaneh Dasar; Majid Ghoshuni; Ghasem Sadeghi Bajestani
Volume 14, Issue 1 , May 2020, , Pages 13-22
Abstract
Autism spectrum disorder is a developmental disorder that involves disorders in social interaction and communication and repetitive or stereotypical behavior. In some children with autism, the sensitivity to acoustic stimuli is much higher than normal (hypersensitive) versus in some other children, this ...
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Autism spectrum disorder is a developmental disorder that involves disorders in social interaction and communication and repetitive or stereotypical behavior. In some children with autism, the sensitivity to acoustic stimuli is much higher than normal (hypersensitive) versus in some other children, this sensitivity is less than normal (hyposensitive). In this study a method for evaluation of auditory system of hypersensitive and hyposensitive autism children using event related potentials (ERPs) was presented. The EEG signal was recorded from 10 autism children (2 girls) with average age of 7.7±2.31 years. In order to record ERPs, 2000 audio stimulation based on the MissMatch Negetivity (MMN) Pattern was presented to participants. These stimulus include 1600 standard sounds with a frequency of 1000 Hz, deviant at 1300 Hz, and noise at frequencies of 1500-1000, 500 and 2000 Hz. In order to analyze ERP data, 18 time domain features have been extracted from the ERP components in all three types of stimulation (standard, deviation, noise). Based on the results, in the deviant stimuli, total positive area of the Pz channel in the hypersensitive group was significantly increased (p=0.028) compared to the hyposensetive group. Also, in the noise stimuli, total positive area in C4 and Pz channels has significantly increased (p=0.028, p=0.009) in the hyposensitive group compared to hypersensetive group. In conclusion, when hypersensitive children were exposed to deviant stimulue, neural activity was increased in parietal lobe, wheras in hyposensitive children neural activity increased in central and parietal lobe during noise stimulue. Therefore, this method can be useful in assessing children's autism spectrum in terms of hearing loss sensitivity.
