Audiology

In this study, we’ll check the electrical nerve impulses that carry sound from the inner ear to the brain by placing electrodes on your ear lobes or behind each ear, as well as on your forehead. The clicking sounds you hear through earphones help our audiologists study interruptions in nerve impulses to your brain.

With this test, audiologists place a tiny microphone in your ear canal opening to measure how well outer hair cells in your inner ear are working.

Small electrodes placed on your face on either side of your nose and on your forehead trigger facial nerves, allowing the audiologist to measure muscle weakness in your face due to problems such as Bell’s palsy.

Measuring your ability to hear tones ranging from low to high helps the audiologist determine degree and type of hearing loss.

To help identify degree and cause of tinnitus, your audiologist will perform a complete hearing exam, that may also involve movement studies of your eyes, jaw, neck, arms and legs or imaging tests, such as CT or MRI scans, to help find underlying disorders causing that persistent sound in your ears.

Using varying amounts of air pressure in the ear canal, tympanometry helps audiologists assess how well your eardrum and middle ear are working. Sound waves transmitted to the tympanic membrane, or eardrum, measure the energy of the reflected sound and provide valuable clues to the cause and degree of hearing loss or tinnitus.

This test provides information about which parts of the balance system you rely on most. You stand in bare feet on a special platform and balance under various conditions, wearing a special harness for safety.

This test measures electrical potentials in your inner ear. ECOG checks for the presence of excess fluid in your inner ear. Results help guide your treatment.

This test records and analyzes your eye movements to identify inner-ear or central nervous system disorders.

This test measures your eye movement to diagnose or rule out inner ear or the central nervous system problems. During this test, you sit in a computer-controlled chair that rotates and oscillates at various speeds. Slow speeds move in a full circle, and faster speeds move back and forth in a small arc. The testing room is dark, but a video camera and a microphone mounted at the top of the chair allows constant contact between you and your audiologist.

VEMP uses electrodes to measure small changes in your neck muscle contractions to check if your saccule, the inferior vestibular nerve, and central connections are intact and working normally.