Modeling the auditory pathway

Johannes J Cilliers, Purdue University

Abstract

There has been much work done to further the knowledge of disorders that affect the auditory pathway. However, current methods of inducing disorders in test animals is very limited. It cannot be done on a neuron by neuron basis, and problems might arise when generalizing results from test animals to humans. The purpose of this work is to address this lack of precision found in the research of the auditory pathway. This work begins to address a solution to this problem by starting to build a complete computational model of the auditory pathway using previously published models. Specifically, a phenomenological model for auditory neurons and a computational model for spherical bushy cells, that were developed independent of each other, were combined into one simulation. The hope of better understanding how disorders affect the auditory pathway is achieved by changing parameters within the models and comparing the outputs. Through experiments that vary parameters from their published values, failure points for parameters are established. Whether those failure points are indicate the useful range of the model or show the failure point of an actual neuron is not conclusive at this point. If it does represent the failure of a neuron, then that would be a useful boundary condition that treatments would need to overcome.

Degree

M.S.E.C.E.

Advisors

Mathur, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Electrical engineering

COinS