title: Altered intensity coding in the salicylate-overdose animal model of tinnitus.
abstract: Tinnitus is one of the leading disorders of hearing with no effective cure as its pathophysiological mechanisms remain unclear. While the sensitivity to sound is well-known to be affected, exactly how intensity coding per se is altered remains unclear. To address this issue, we used a salicylate-overdose animal model of tinnitus to measure auditory cortical evoked potentials at various stimulus levels, and analyzed on single-trial basis the response strength and its variance for the computation of the lower bound of Fisher information. Based on Fisher information profiles, we compared the precision or efficiency of intensity coding before and after salicylate-treatment. We found that after salicylate treatment, intensity coding was unexpectedly improved, rather than impaired. Also, the improvement varied in a sound-dependent way. The observed changes are likely due to some central compensatory mechanisms that are activated during tinnitus to bring out the full capacity of intensity coding which is expressed only in part under normal conditions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physiology, Medical College, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Ilynn
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Wan
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.
authors.forename: Ondrej
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Pokora
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological Science and Technology, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Tzaiwen
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Chiu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Physiology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, Czech Republic.
authors.forename: Petr
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Lansky
authors.affiliation: Department of Physiology, Medical College, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Paul Waifung
authors.initials: PW
authors.lastname: Poon
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D000818:Animals; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D008144:Loudness Perception; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley; D012459:Salicylates; D014012:Tinnitus / Q000139:chemically induced / Q000503:physiopathology*
chemical_list: D012459:Salicylates
keywords: Auditory evoked potential; Electrocorticogram; Fisher information; Rat; Salicylate-overdose; Tinnitus