The intersubject reliability of cortical auditory evoked potential (CAEP) in pediatric cochlear implant recipients: comparisons between acoustic and electrical stimulations

To compare the intersubject reliability of cortical auditory evoked potential (CAEP) elicited by acoustic and electrical stimulations in pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients.

Twenty-two MED-EL CI recipients (aged 13–93 months) participated in this study. The acoustic CAEP (aCAEP) waveforms were elicited using four speech stimuli (/ba/, /m/, /g/, and /t/) presented at 65 dB SPL in a free-field condition. The electrical CAEP (eCAEP) responses were obtained by presenting electrical pulses through apical, medial, and basal electrodes. The aCAEP and eCAEP data (n = 28 ears) were analyzed using coefficient of variation (CV) and other appropriate statistics.

P1, N1, and P2 peaks were observed in most of the children (92.9% response rate). The CV values were smaller for the latency metric (13.6–34.2%) relative to the amplitude metric (51.3–92.4%), and the differences were statistically significant (p < 0.001). The aCAEP yielded smaller mean CV values than the eCAEP (for both latency and amplitude measures), and the mean CV value for the aCAEP (15.6%) was found to be statistically different from that of the eCAEP (31.0%) for the P1 latency (p = 0.001).

This study is the first to report the intersubject reliability of aCAEP and eCAEP in pediatric CI recipients. Overall, CAEP latencies were found to be more reliable than CAEP amplitudes, and the aCAEP testing demonstrated higher intersubject reliability compared to the eCAEP assessment. The present study’s findings can be beneficial for researchers and clinicians in documenting CAEP in children who use CI.