Using Variations of Somatosensory Evoked Potentials to Quantify Spinal Cord Injury Level

Hasan Mir, Hasan Al-Nashash, Douglas Kerr, Angelo All, Nitish Thakor

Department of Electrical Engineering, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE.
Department of Neurology, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA.

DOI: 10.4236/eng.2013.510B020                

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.

Keywords

Somatosensory Evoked Potential (SEP); Spinal Cord Injury (SCI); Signal Morphology

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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