Injury-Dependent Changes in Somatosensory Evoked Potentials in the Rats

Somatosensory evoked potential (SSEP) change elicited by neurologic injury could be too small to see. In this paper, different SSEPs were recorded in the models including the normal, lesion, devastation (the neural tract is fully transected) and death model in rats. Besides latency and amplitude of the SSEP waveform, new indices such as mean amplitude, entropy and mean residence time (MRT) were used to evaluate the SSEP difference in the normal and lesion model. Results revealed that MRT maximally represented the difference and it should be the best index to the SSEP change in a neurologic injury. Meanwhile, different to the concept that neurologic injury causes retardation in latency and reduction in amplitude in SSEP, both the latency and amplitude shrank in the devastation and death model.