Quantification of Spinal Cord Injury Level Using Somatosensory Evoked Potentials

Abstract

This paper uses a modified correlation metric to study the somatosensory evoked potential (SEP) in rodents afflicted with spinal cord injury (SCI). It has been shown that specific features of the SEP signal are a strong indicator of the integrity of the spinal pathway. The metric used in this paper exploits an adaptive template tailored to specific features of interest in the SEP signal, thereby providing a more robust assessment of the level of SCI compared to conventional metrics such as Pearson's correlation coefficient. Results are presented using actual SEP signals collected on rodents with various levels of SCI.