Development of a hardware for intraoperative spinal cord monitoring and automatic alarm system

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The iatrogenic spinal cord injury, which can occur during aggressive surgical procedures on the spine and spinal cord, should be avoided. To accomplish this purpose, intraoperative spinal cord monitoring is carried out by observing spinal cord evoked potentials, although, there was no appropriate hardware made in Japan.Being supported by this grant, we have developed a hardware exclusively designed to record evoked potentials. Special attention was paid to equip with easily understandable control ability and high fidelity sensitivity.Therefore, the combined method of parameter setting was selected, namely; the key board control method and potentiometer controls which are regarded to be more acceptable for the paramedical assistants. Sensitivity of the amplifier, strength of the stimulation and sweep speed of the osciloscope are controlled by turning knobs, and it made circulating nurse possible to change recording conditions.This hardware has ability to made alarm sound if the peak to peak amplitude of the selected peak of potential degraded less than initially set percentage of the same component of control wave. In the operating theatre, this automatic alarm system can offer great feasibility of this instrument for the purpose of the spinal cord monitoring.