Discrimination between Patients with Acoustic Neuroma and with Peripheral Vestibular Lesion by Human Posture Dynamics

A group of normal subjects (n = 17) was compared with two groups of patients, either with vestibular neuritis (n = 18) or with acoustic neuroma (n = 35) by means of posturography when stance was perturbed with vibrators attached to the calf muscles. Dynamic control of human posture was quantified by means of system identification, and the characteristic parameters of swiftness. stiffness, and damping of a transfer function from vibration to force platform response were used for further comparison. Fisher linear discriminate analysis was used to distinguish sets of parameters characteristic of each disease. Hence it was possible to distinguish the vestibular neuritis group both from the normal group (p