Hirofumi Nagashino, Ken’ichi Fujimoto, Yohsuke Kinouchi, Ali A. Danesh, and Abhijit S. Pandya
Tinnitus, sound therapy, neural oscillator, inhibition, noise, plasticity
Perception of continuous or intermittent sounds ringing in the ears without any external source is referred to as tinnitus. For the management of tinnitus one of the most effective approaches is sound therapy. Previously, we demonstrated a conceptual and computational plastic neural oscillator model for the mechanisms of tinnitus generation and the clinical effects of sound therapy on tinnitus. The proposed model has a stable oscillatory state and a stable equilibrium (non-oscillatory) state. It can be hypothesized that the oscillation state corresponds to the generation of tinnitus and the equilibrium state corresponds to the state in which the tinnitus is inhibited. Through numerical simulations of this model it was found that the oscillation can be inhibited by supplying band-pass noise (BN) stimuli, which clinically has been used as a stimulus for treatment of tinnitus (i.e., sound therapy). The current paper describes the inhibition of the oscillation by yet two different types of noise stimuli: Gaussian white noise (GWN) and additive uniform noise (AUN). This investigation shows that only smaller RMS value of GWN input could inhibit the oscillation. When larger RMS values of GWN were employed the inhibition of oscillation was not frequent. It was observed that AUN can inhibit the oscillation with higher possibility than GWN or BN. It is an interesting result although it does not directly suggest that AUN is better than GWN or BN in clinic.
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