title: A beamformer for the acquisition of evoked potentials.
abstract: Evoked potentials (EP) contain information about various physiological parameters and the estimation and detection of these signals can aid in the diagnosis of many pathological conditions. However, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for EP measurement is often very low, and thus signal processing techniques must be employed to enhance the SNR. A delay and sum beamformer acquisition system has the potential for significant SNR improvement in EP measurements. In this communication it is shown that an electrode array acquisition system implements a uniform coherent delay and sum beamformer. The performance of the beamformer is characterized in terms of the number of electrodes, and cross-channel correlation. When compared to conventional ensemble averaging, the beamformer reduces the number of response repetitions required to achieve a given SNR by a factor which approaches the number of channels in the acquisition system.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada.
authors.forename: C A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: McKinley
authors.forename: P A
authors.initials: PA
authors.lastname: Parker
mesh_terms: D004566:Electrodes; D005073:Evoked Potentials, Somatosensory; D005583:Fourier Analysis; D006801:Humans; D008475:Median Nerve / Q000502:physiology; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted