TIME-VARYING EVOKED-POTENTIALS

In an important subset of surgical procedures, the procedure itself po ses a significant threat to the patient's nervous system. In order to reduce this threat, neurophysiological function of the structures at r isk may be monitored during surgery using time-locked sensory or motor -evoked responses. A simple but powerful extension of the segmented an d sliding average techniques currently in wide use is described and de monstrated. By filling polynomial functions of time to capture time va riations in tire evoked response, signal/noise enhancement comparable with that of averaging if obtained.,More importantly, a considerable i mprovement in lime resolution is gained. In the demonstration data set Presented in the fixtures, clinically significant changes were identi fiable in one-sixth of the time required using signal averaging.