Thesis on the "Extension of the Dresden Tympanoplasty Model" successfully defended!

In his 23-week project, Amin Langer focused on extending the Dresden Tympanoplasty Model, originally developed to support otologic surgeons at the start of their careers. The model allows for audiological subjective live feedback on the quality of the reconstruction during surgical procedures.

However, it became evident that the model's function was limited in terms of signal processing and output. The analog capture and processing of sounds meant that the environment had a significant impact on the auditory impression obtained.

As part of this thesis, the existing model was extended. Guidance, suggestions, and advice were provided by Dr. rer. medic Matthias Bornitz and Dr.-Ing. Hannes Seidler, both long-time employees at the ERCD. A deterministic excitation and a digital signal processing unit were integrated to enable an objective characterization of the reconstruction condition through the calculation of the transfer function. This results in an output signal that is essentially independent of ambient noise. A prototype conforming to this concept was successfully developed. This prototype will now be further improved to make a valuable contribution to future teaching.

One major challenge was the requirement to use cost-effective standard hardware. Taking this constraint into account, the implementation was intricate, particularly with respect to time, resolution, and accuracy requirements.

The work was reviewed and supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Ercan Altinsoy as the responsible academic advisor and Junior Professor Dr. Anindya Nag at the Institute for Acoustics and Speech Communication, Chair of Acoustics and Haptics.

For further reading, please refer to the literature published by the ERCD through the following links: