Application of Artificial Intelligence in Tinnitus Diagnosis and Treatment: A Pilot Study

Tinnitus is the perception of phantom sound when there is no sound source, often described as ringing in the ear. Symptoms of tinnitus vary significantly from person to person. Its severity can be largely attributed to an individual’s reaction to the condition. While some people can go on without medical intervention, an increasing number seek medical help. Unlike other diseases, tinnitus pathophysiology is complex and sometimes inexplicable. Currently, there are no universally accepted treatment options for this condition. Moreover, there is no well-established correlation between tinnitus features and projection of treatment. In practice, the treatments provided by practitioners are not based on defined and regulated rules or expected outcomes for patients. Instead, they are at a certain level and differ significantly between clinicians and across regions. The complexity of tinnitus features and lack of well-adapted prognostic treatments present an excellent opportunity for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). AI models can learn the intricate patterns between tinnitus features and treatments, as suggested by experts. In this study, we trained an AI model with an expert system to predict tinnitus treatment based on patients’ tinnitus symptoms. We describe the curation of the input data, the algorithm (CTGan) used to extend the dataset, and the ML model (Random Forest) to predict each of the suggested treatments. The average accuracy score of the trained model is currently between 0.81 and 0.96 for most treatment predictions, based on a small input dataset size of 300 samples.