Vertigo Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Vertigo, including details on causes, symptoms, treatment, dizziness.

A signal analysis technique of vestibulo-ocular reflex stimulated with impulsive head movements.

Juhola M, Aalto H, Hirvonen T

Department of Computer Sciences, 33014 University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland.

Eye movements have been investigated in several areas of medicine and also elsewhere, such as in psychology or even in the development of human-computer interfaces. In the last few years we have designed a technique to stimulate, measure and analyze vestibulo-ocular reflex eye movements. In the otoneurological literature these are seen as a novel and promising means of revealing certain disorders and diseases associated with vertigo. Vestibulo-ocular reflex is stimulated by impulsive head movements. We developed the present pattern recognition technique to detect the stimulus (impulsive head movements) and the vestibulo-ocular reflex (response eye movements) generated from signals and to compute the latency and the gain values between them. Using our technique to calculate these attributes, we obtained clearly different results for a group of 22 dizzy patients than for a group of 30 healthy subjects.

Published 17 July 2006 in Ann Biomed Eng, 34(7): 1213-25.
Full-text of this article is available online (may require subscription).

© 2005-2008 Vertigo Research Today. All Rights Reserved.