Spinal cord injury evaluation using morphological difference of somatosensory evoked potentials

It has been shown that the difference between somatosensory evoked potential (SEP) signals from a healthy and injured spinal cord is a strong indicator of the level of damage to the spinal pathway. This paper presents a method to evaluate the level of spinal cord injury (SCI) using the morphological difference between SEP signals. The dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm is a robust signal alignment technique that is sensitive to both amplitude and temporal differences. As such, the DTW alignment cost is used in this paper as a metric to evaluate the level of SCI. Results are presented using actual SEP signals collected on rodents with various levels of SCI.