A Novel Carbon Paste Electrode for Convenient and Efficient Auditory Brainstem Response Acquisition: A Pilot Study

Auditory Brainstem Response (ABR) is the commonly used tool in Otology for clinical hearing loss and disease diagnoses. Wet electrodes, served as the gold standard, are widely used in clinical settings to acquire ABR signals for superior performance. However, it is a complex and time-consuming process to fix the electrodes by applying bandages or adhesive tapes. Moreover, wet electrodes might cause allergy and uncomfortable for patients, especially for children. Therefore, a novel anhydrous carbon paste electrode (CPE) with adhesion and biocompatibility was proposed to solve the aforementioned problems. The impedance of unfixed CPE and Conductive Paste-based electrode was recorded, and the ABR waveforms obtained by both two methods were systematically compared to further investigate and verify the feasibility of the proposed unfixed CPE. The results showed that the proposed CPE could achieve high-quality ABR recording under unfixed condition, which was comparable with the gold standard method. Besides, the analyses of the latency and amplitude of the ABRs showed that unfixed CPE could acquire higher amplitudes which would help with wave recognition, while the latency was similar. This proved that the unfixed CPE could obtain ABR with the same information compared with that of Paste-based ABR, since the physicians always made the diagnosis by analyzing the latency. Furtherly, we compared the correlation coefficient of the ABRs under different averaging times, and the results showed that unfixed CPE was comparable, even better than the conventional method.