Real-time somatosensory evoked potential monitoring using FPGA-based adaptive filter

This study was to analyze the performance of fixed-point adaptive signal enhancer (ASE) for somsatosensory evoked potential (SEP) measurement. An animal study was conducted to evaluate the usefulness of this technique in detection of spinal cord injury. The ASE technique has been reported powerful to improve signal to noise ratio of SEP. Therefore, we proposed an integrated circuit module to perform real time ASE for fast SEP measurement, and a fast fixed-point algorithm was employed in the field programmable gate array design. We compared the SEP results from FPGA-based ASE methods and the conventional ensemble averaging (EA) method during an animal experiment. Experimental results on a spinal cord compressive injury model showed that the FPGA-based ASE methods have superior performance over the EA method. It would be helpful to design fixed-point ASE based on FPGA for real-time monitoring of intraoperative SEP.