Data fusion of Electromyography signals from intraoperative nerve monitoring and position information from surgical navigation

This article presents a new method for the data fusion of the intraoperative Electromyography (EMG) signals from a nerve monitor with the position information from a surgical navigation system. In principle, EMG signals and the position information are merged with each other based on the distance-threshold relationship. The merged information can be used to control the power of active surgical instruments intelligently or to improve the surgeon´s orientation in operating field during challenging interventions on temporal bones. One part of the described method for stimulation modeling was also verified in an experiment under simplified laboratory conditions. The results show an approximate agreement between the modeled and the measured “distance-threshold” relationship till 2 mm. The curve fitting of the measured and modeled data indicates that a quadratic relationship fits better in the data than a cubic.