Neurometric evaluation of the cortical somatosensory evoked potential in acute incomplete spinal cord injuries.
The clinical application of evoked potentials has at times been criticized for its failure to provide an objective quantifiable assessment of the processing of sensory information and a reflection of nervous system integrity at least comparable in accuracy to other methods of assessment. The challenge is to quantify the SEP in a manner that accurately reflects the function of the somatosensory system. Therefore, neurometrics, an approach which emphasizes the transformation of neurophysiological data to a common metric of relative probability by reference to normative standards and the classification of critical features of data by multivariate statistics, was employed. The 3-part study involved the evaluation of the diagnostic, prognostic and localization functions of the cortical tibial SEP in patients with incomplete spinal cord injuries. Two neurometric indices which correlated well with concurrent and future neurological status were developed. The distributions of influence of dorsal columns and spino-thalamic tracts on the SEP were established.
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D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000503:physiopathology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005073:Evoked Potentials, Somatosensory; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011379:Prognosis; D013119:Spinal Cord Injuries / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology