Assessment of Spinal Cord Injury via Sparse Modeling of Somatosensory Evoked Potential Signals

The morphological differences between somatosensory evoked potential (SEP) signals from a normal spinal pathway and spinal pathway affected by spinal cord injury (SCI) provide an indication of the degree of SCI. A sparse representation of the fit between these signals is proposed in this paper as an SCI assessment method. The proposed method is tested on actual SEP signals collected from rodents that have been subjected to spinal transection. Results indicate that the proposed method provides a robust measure of the different degrees of SCI resulting from transection of the spinal cord.