A single brief dynamic amplitude-modulated envelope-following response plus machine learning reads out cochlear neural degeneration in gerbils and transfers to human listeners
The authors tested a dynamic amplitude-modulated (dAM) envelope-following response (EFR) that sweeps the full modulation spectrum in a single brief stimulus, found selective deficits at fast modulation rates without threshold elevation in Mongolian gerbils with histologically verified cochlear neural degeneration (CND), trained a machine-learning classifier that distinguished young from middle-aged animals with high accuracy and whose most informative feature (power near 400-500 Hz) tracked synapse counts, and applied the gerbil-trained classifier without retraining to 56 human listeners, where it separated age groups above chance.