Continuous Quantitative Motor Evoked Potentials for Spinal Cord Injury Detection

Abstract

Motor evoked potential (MEP) monitoring is a complementary approach to directly monitor the integrity of the motor pathway and is another modality designed to ensure the integrity of the spinal cord during surgery. However, conventional interpretation of MEP signal based on amplitude and latency tracking is subjective and not always accurate, and usually a significant learning curve has been demonstrated. Hence, we proposed a quantitative time frequency analysis method, window energy index, for monitoring spinal cord surgery. The preliminary results suggest the proposed analysis has better sensitivity than conventional amplitude analysis