Novel Modeling of Somatosensory Evoked Potentials for the Assessment of Spinal Cord Injury

Objective:
Previous work has shown that differences in the somatosensory evoked potential (SEP) signals between a normal spinal pathway and spinal pathway affected by spinal cord injury (SCI) provide a means to study the degree of injury. This paper proposes a novel quantitative SCI assessment method using time-domain SEP signals.
Methods:
A pruned and unstructured fit between SEP signals from a normal spinal pathway and a spinal pathway affected by SCI is developed using methods inspired by recent results in sparse reconstruction theory. The coefficients from the resulting fit are used to develop a quantitative assessment of SCI that is tested on actual SEP signals collected from rodents that have been subjected to partial and complete spinal cord transection.
Results:
The proposed method provides a rich parametric measure that integrates SEP amplitude, time latency, and morphology, while exhibiting a high degree of correlation with existing subjective and quantitative SCI assessment methods.
Conclusion:
The proposed SCI encapsulates a model of the injury to quantify SCI.
Significance:
The proposed SCI quantification method may be used to complement existing SCI assessment methods.