Frequency-specific ASSR monitoring during anesthesia: Preliminary results

Introduction: During surgery in the cerebellopontine angle, e.g. for acoustic neuroma (AN), there is a risk of damaging the cochlear nerve. For intraoperative monitoring, different methods are applied since several years, e.g. auditory evoked potentials (AEP). However, these are not frequency-specific and thus only provide limited information about hearing quality. In contrast, the possibility to measure an audiogram intraoperatively could suggest preserved but qualitatively insufficient hearing and allow tailoring of surgery. Since the 80ies, it is known that the „Auditory Steady State Response“ (ASSR)1,2 can b…