Hair Cells Loss Estimation from Audiograms

Age-related hearing loss is characterized by a progressive loss of threshold sensitivity, especially at high frequencies. There is increasing evidence that the loss of cilia in the inner and outer hair cells is the dominant cause of hearing loss. We present a framework for calculating the human auditory threshold based on a non-linear time-domain cochlear model that incorporates hair cell damage along the cochlear partition. We successfully predicted the audiogram measured prior to death by substituting the postmortem percentage of surviving hair cells, using data from Wu et al. (Wu et al., 2020). We also present an algorithm for estimating the percentage of hair cells from a measured audiogram. Comparison with the data from Wu et al. revealed that the algorithm accurately predicted the surviving inner hair cells along the entire cochlear partition and the outer hair cells at the basal part of the cochlea.