TITLE:
Using Variations of Somatosensory Evoked Potentials to Quantify Spinal Cord Injury Level
AUTHORS:
Hasan Mir, Hasan Al-Nashash, Douglas Kerr, Angelo All, Nitish Thakor
KEYWORDS:
Somatosensory Evoked Potential (SEP); Spinal Cord Injury (SCI); Signal Morphology
JOURNAL NAME:
Engineering,
Vol.5 No.10B,
October
25,
2013
ABSTRACT: Existing work indicates that the degree of variation of
somatosensory evoked potential (SEP) signals between a healthy spinal pathway
and spinal pathway affected by spinal cord injury (SCI) can be used to evaluate
the integrity of the spinal pathway. This paper develops a metric that
exploits the time-domain features of SEP signals (relative amplitude, time
scaling, and time duration) in order to quantify the level of SCI. The proposed
method is tested on actual SEP signals collected from rodents afflicted with
focal demyelination SCI. Results indicate that the proposed method provides a
robust assessment of the different degrees of demyelination in the spinal cord.