Allgaier Johannes, Schlee Winfried, Probst Thomas, Pryss Rüdiger
Institute of Clinical Epidemiology and Biometry, University of Würzburg, 97070 Würzburg, Germany.
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Regensburg, 93053 Regensburg, Germany.
J Clin Med. 2022 Jul 22;11(15):4270. doi: 10.3390/jcm11154270.
Tinnitus is an auditory phantom perception without external sound stimuli. This chronic perception can severely affect quality of life. Because tinnitus symptoms are highly heterogeneous, multimodal data analyses are increasingly used to gain new insights. MHealth data sources, with their particular focus on country- and season-specific differences, can provide a promising avenue for new insights. Therefore, we examined data from the TrackYourTinnitus (TYT) mHealth platform to create symptom profiles of TYT users. We used gradient boosting engines to classify momentary tinnitus and regress tinnitus loudness, using country of origin and season as features. At the daily assessment level, tinnitus loudness can be regressed with a mean absolute error rate of 7.9% points. In turn, momentary tinnitus can be classified with an F1 score of 93.79%. Both results indicate differences in the tinnitus of TYT users with respect to season and country of origin. The significance of the features was evaluated using statistical and explainable machine learning methods. It was further shown that tinnitus varies with temperature in certain countries. The results presented show that season and country of origin appear to be valuable features when combined with longitudinal mHealth data at the level of daily assessment.
耳鸣是一种在无外部声音刺激情况下的听觉幻觉。这种慢性感知会严重影响生活质量。由于耳鸣症状具有高度异质性，多模态数据分析越来越多地被用于获取新的见解。移动健康（mHealth）数据源特别关注特定国家和季节的差异，可为获取新见解提供一条有前景的途径。因此，我们检查了TrackYourTinnitus（TYT）移动健康平台的数据，以创建TYT用户的症状概况。我们使用梯度提升引擎，以原籍国和季节为特征，对瞬时耳鸣进行分类，并对耳鸣响度进行回归分析。在每日评估层面，耳鸣响度回归分析的平均绝对误差率为7.9个百分点。反过来，瞬时耳鸣分类的F1分数为93.79%。这两个结果均表明，TYT用户的耳鸣在季节和原籍国方面存在差异。使用统计和可解释的机器学习方法评估了这些特征的重要性。进一步表明，在某些国家，耳鸣会随温度变化。所呈现的结果表明，在每日评估层面，当与纵向移动健康数据相结合时，季节和原籍国似乎是有价值的特征。
