Researchers at Northwestern’s auditory neuroscience laboratory have developed a new technology to help identify learning disabilities in children.
After a decade of research and more than 1,000 test cases, the technology, referred to as the Biological Marker of Auditory Processing, is being released for clinical use. Using electrodes attached to a patient’s scalp, BioMap detects disturbances in the brain’s electrical response to sound waves, measuring delays a few tenths of a second long. This “jitter” is evidence of an auditory impairment.
“This work is going out of the research lab and into the clinical environment,” said communication sciences and disorders Prof. Nina Kraus, who developed the technology alongside auditory neuroscience laboratory manager Trent Nicol and communication sciences and disorders Prof. Steven Zecker.
In February NU licensed BioMap to Bio-Logic Systems Corp., based in Mundelein, Ill. Kraus said BioLogic will further develop the technology to make it more user- friendly and marketable.
Kraus said auditory processing impairment has been found in 30 percent of children with language-based learning disabilities, an umbrella category that includes dyslexia and attention deficit disorder.
“Our project from the beginning cast a very broad net,” Kraus said. “This jitter in the brain’s response to sound cuts across these broad diagnostic categories”
Kraus said BioMap’s testing of a physiological response makes it inherently more objective than traditional, task-oriented diagnostics for learning disabilities.
“The fact is that any test that relies on a child or a person to respond overtly and consciously is going to have possible confounds,” Kraus said. “Are they paying attention, do they want to do the task, do they care?”
“There’s an obvious advantage,” she added, “especially when you have a child who has an auditory deficit perhaps, to be able to objectively measure how a child responds to sound, irrespective of what the child is thinking.”
Prof. Zecker said the BioMap test will also allow doctors to diagnose learning disorders during the crucial, early stages of a child’s development.
“It allows for the potential earlier diagnoses of these problems,” said Zecker. “There’s a tremendous emphasis today on early prevention. And we know that the earlier we try to remediate these problems, the more successful.”
Many of today’s diagnostics, he added, are useless for children under the age of seven.
“They simply can’t handle the young,” he said.
Because it only detects auditory impairments, the BioMap test cannot identify every child with a learning disability, nor can it absolutely determine that a child is not learning disabled.
But it will be able to positively identify a select group of disabled children.
“We’re not claiming that we’ll be able to pick up every disordered kid with this, but we’ll be able to pick up a subset,” Zecker said.
To Zecker’s knowledge, there is no other research being done to create an objective diagnostic like BioMap. He said many scientists are wary to undertake these projects because of past failures.
“Some of these types of measures have been proposed before and they haven’t been very successful,” said Zecker. “Twenty years ago some guy made a claim that dyslexia would be diagnosed in schools with a similar machine that took a brain scan and said you’re dyslexic or not. And in the 1980s people believed him.”
With BioMap heading toward clinical use, and with the medical community’s ever-expanding understanding of the human brain, Zecker expects other researchers will soon follow suit.
“In the years to come, there will be more of this sort of thing,” he said. “The question is will it be five years or a decade. I think that is the unknown at this point.”
Reach Jordan Weissmann at [email protected].
