Al-Nashash Hasan, Luo Shiyu, Liu Xiaogang, All Angelo H
Department of Electrical Engineering, College of Engineering, ESB-2018, Engineering Science Building, American University of Sharjah, University City, Sharjah, 26666, United Arab Emirates.
Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Traylor Building, 720 Rutland Ave., Baltimore, MD, 21205, USA.
J Neurosci Methods. 2020 Sep 1;343:108858. doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2020.108858. Epub 2020 Jul 9.
Patients who suffered from spinal cord injury (SCI) that come to healthcare professionals for diagnosis and treatment do not have electrophysiology baseline of somatosensory evoked potential (SSEP). The SSEP has always been used in research for data comparison to detect onset and severity of the SCI as well as for assessing its progress, endogenous and therapeutic recovery. This unmet need has motivated us to develop a new tool to substitute the baseline data with forelimb SSEP data of the same day. In this study, we report the development and investigation of three distinctive thoracic transections (right T10 hemi-transection (Rxl), left T8 and right T10 double hemi-transection (Dxl) and T8 complete transection (Cxl)) spinal cord injuries in an adult rat model. We used our well-established monitoring methods to obtain SSEP baselines as well as post-injury signals from days 4, 7, 14 and 21. We observed that spectral coherences obtained from non-injured spinal cord pathways are always above 0.8. The spectral coherence is dimensionless measure with values between 0 and 1 and measures the correlation between two time signals in the frequency domain. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) results also showed that there is a significant difference between the spectral coherence componanet means before and after injury with reaching p = 0.05 for Rxl, p = 0.02 for DxI, and p = 0.00 for CxI. Our signal processing enables us to replicate comparable detection of the natural history of injuries longitudinally without the implication of baseline SSEP signals, highlighting the potential of this analysis method for clinical studies.
因脊髓损伤（SCI）前来医疗专业人员处进行诊断和治疗的患者没有体感诱发电位（SSEP）的电生理基线。SSEP一直用于研究中进行数据比较，以检测SCI的发病和严重程度，以及评估其进展、内源性恢复和治疗性恢复情况。这种未得到满足的需求促使我们开发一种新工具，用同一天的前肢SSEP数据替代基线数据。在本研究中，我们报告了在成年大鼠模型中三种不同胸段横断（右T10半横断（Rxl）、左T8和右T10双半横断（Dxl）以及T8完全横断（Cxl））脊髓损伤的开发和研究情况。我们使用成熟的监测方法获取SSEP基线以及损伤后第4天、第7天、第14天和第21天的信号。我们观察到，从未受伤的脊髓通路获得的频谱相干性始终高于0.8。频谱相干性是一种无量纲度量，值在0到1之间，用于测量频域中两个时间信号之间的相关性。方差分析（ANOVA）结果还表明，损伤前后频谱相干分量均值之间存在显著差异，Rxl的p值为0.05，DxI的p值为0.02，CxI的p值为0.00。我们的信号处理使我们能够纵向复制对损伤自然史的可比检测，而无需基线SSEP信号，突出了这种分析方法在临床研究中的潜力。
