Development of a neuro-searching system

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The objective of the research is to develop a system to indicate the position of the nerves, with respect to tomographic images, during surgical operations. In this system, we stimulate the peripheral nerves and detect the corresponding evoked potentials via multi-dipole electrode, specially arranged for this measurement. The position of the electrode, with respect to the tomographic images, is read from the articulated navigation system. Then the estimated nerve position is superimposed on the tomographic image on CRT.For the successful operation, it is very important to improve the signal to noise ratio and reduce the number of iterative measurements required for the averaging process. In this research we, at first, developed a feature-map type neural network to average the evoked potential data in the feature space, to improve the averaging efficiency. Secondly, we applied a backpropagation network to estimate the nerve position, with respect to the probing electrodes, from a set of evoked potential waveforms. With computer simulation and/or fundamental experiments with volunteers, we confirmed the effectiveness of these networks.