Modeling for the Impact of Anesthesia on Neural Activity in the Auditory System

In this paper, mathematical models for the auditory system were derived to characterize the impact of anesthesia on auditory systems and mechanism of hearing damage. The auditory system was represented by a model with external sound stimuli as the input and the neuron firing rates as the output, and represented as a black-box input-output system. Two parallel subsystem models were developed: an ARX model for the auditory system under external stimuli and an ARMA model for the spontaneous activities of the neurons in primary auditory cortex. The models provide a quantitative characterization of anesthesia’s impacts and describe the mechanism of hearing loss on auditory transmission channels.