Unification of Treatments and Interventions for Tinnitus Patients (UNITI)
UNITI results
UNITI project finished in September 2023. It’s overall aim was to deliver a predictive computational model based on existing and longitudinal data attempting to address the question which treatment approach is optimal for a specific patient based on specific parameters. Clinical, epidemiological, medical, genetic and audiological data, including signals reflecting ear-brain communication, were analysed from existing databases. Predictive factors for different patient groups were extracted and their prognostic relevance were tested in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in which different groups of patients underwent a combination of therapies targeting the auditory and central nervous systems.
Click here to learn more about the UNITI results.
It is with great sadness that we must share the news that David Baguley, colleague, friend and member of the external Advisory Board, has passed away. David was a pioneer in tinnitus therapy and research. Our thoughts are with his family and friends at this sad time...
Read an obituary of David on the Blog written by members of the University of Nottingham Hearing Sciences Team and/or the NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre.
We are happy to announce that Miro Schleicher from UNITI team at Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg has received the Marco Ramoni best paper award at the 20th Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME) conference for his paper 'When can I expect the mHealth user to return? Prediction meets time series with gaps' (Miro Schleicher, Rüdiger Pryss, Winfried Schlee and Myra Spiliopoulou).
In this paper the new machine learning method analyses the behaviour of users towards an mHealth app, learns from the absence of data and predicts if and when a user will start using the app again.
We are happy to announce that Deutsche Tinnitus-Liga e. V. supports UNITI survey on "Estimating the socioeconomic cost of Tinnitus". The Deutsche Tinnitus-Liga e. V. (DTL) is the only Tinnitus association in Germany.
Ιnformation about the study and a link to the survey is published on www.tinnitus-liga.de as well as on Facebook (Deutsche Tinnitus-Liga e.V.) and Instagram (deutsche_tinnitus_liga).
We are happy to announce that we have a new paper published in Frontiers in Neuroscience: "Predicting Ecological Momentary Assessments in an App for Tinnitus by Learning From Each User's Stream With a Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit".
Our main findings are that for EMA prediction the entity-centric predictors should be preferred over a user-insensitive global model, and that the choice of EMA items should be further investigated, because some items are answered more rarely than others. Albeit our CMAB-based prediction workflow is robust to differences in exposition and in interaction intensity, experimentators that design studies with mHealth apps should be prepared to quantify and closely monitor differences in the intensity of user-app interaction, since users with many interactions may have a disproportionate influence on global models.
More information about this publication can be found here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.836834/.
The study center in Granada is still looking for tinnitus patients who would like to participate in the UNITI study! There are still study places available for patients who are mildly or severely affected by their tinnitus but do NOT have hearing loss.
If these criteria apply to you, then please participate in the pre-screening
El centro de estudios de Granada sigue buscando pacientes con tinnitus que quieran participar en el estudio UNITI. Todavía hay plazas de estudio disponibles para los pacientes que están afectados leve o gravemente por sus acúfenos pero que NO tienen una pérdida de audición.
Si estos criterios se aplican a usted, participe en la pre-screening.
Data and analysis scripts of the UNITI-RCT results are currently available upon request (stefan.schoisswohl@klinik.uni-regensburg.de).