The Medical Physics section performs interdisciplinary research in the areas Hearing and audiology, Neurosensory science and systems, Digital hearing aids and speech/audio processing. The group was founded by Prof. Dr. Dr. Birger Kollmeier in Göttingen in 1986 and moved to the Institute of Physics at the University of Oldenburg in 1993. Research on Medical Radiation Physics is performed by a joint working group of the Pius-Hospital Oldenburg and the University.
The basic concept is to investigate the properties of the normal and the impaired auditory system, both with psychophysical and physiological methods, and to apply this knowledge to areas with important practical problems, such as automatic speech recognition, optimization of diagnostic methods for hearing disorders, and noise reduction in hearing aids using "intelligent" signal processing strategies that can adapt to the respective acoustical situation. Although the scope of this work includes aspects from medicine (i.e., ENT medicine, audiology), psychology (psychophysics, perception research), neurobiology (EEG recording and analysis, neuroimaging), communication engineering, and computer science, the principle approach to tackle the main issues in our work originates from physics. Based on empirical data, we attempt to model the underlying processes. The model is again tested against real data. The interaction between experiment and model resembles the alliance between experimental and theoretical physics where most of the methods employed originate from.