Tinnitus and distress: an electroencephalography classification study

In this study, Piarulli et al. conduct a thorough classification procedure for EEG data acquired from tinnitus patients and healthy controls. The authors develop two classifiers that can accurately distinguish tinnitus patients from healthy controls as well as tinnitus patients with low and high distress levels. There exist no objective markers for tinnitus or tinnitus disorders, which complicates diagnosis and treatments. The combination of EEG with sophisticated classification procedures may reveal biomarkers that can identify tinnitus and accurately differentiate different levels of distress experienced by patients. EEG recordings were obtained from 129 tinnitus patients and 142 healthy controls. Linear support vector machines were used to develop two classifiers: the first differentiated tinnitus patients from controls, while the second differentiated tinnitus patients with low and high distress levels. The classifier for healthy controls and tinnitus patients performed with an average accuracy of 96 and 94% for the training and test sets, respectively. For the distress classifier, these average accuracies were 89 and 84%. Minimal overlap was observed between the features of the two classifiers. EEG-derived features made it possible to accurately differentiate healthy controls and tinnitus patients as well as low and high distress tinnitus patients. The minimal overlap between the features of the two classifiers indicates that the source of distress in tinnitus, which could also be involved in distress related to other conditions, stems from different neuronal mechanisms compared to those causing the tinnitus pathology itself.