Severity Assessment of Spinal Cord Injury

Dr. Hasan Al-Nashash and Dr. Hasan Mir

Department of Electrical Engineering

Email: [email protected] and [email protected]

Motivation

• There is a need to develop methods for evaluating the level of SCI. Such methods are important not only for evaluating the effectiveness of therapeutic mechanisms, but also in providing timely surgical intervention.

Goal

• To use physiological signals to develop a non-subjective and quantitative assessment of the severity of SCI.

Method

• The similarity between a somatosensory evoked potential (SEP) signal from a healthy spinal pathway (which in the event of thoracic SCI can be obtained by forelimb stimulation) and a SEP signal from an injured spinal pathway (which can be obtained by hind limb stimulation) can be used as an objective measure of the severity of SCI, thus providing a complementary measure to qualitative behavioral based assessments.

Result

• The developed SCI quantification methods were applied to SEP signals on rodents that were subjected to spinal cord transection. The results exhibit a high degree of correlation with existing subjective SCI assessment methods. Moreover, the results provide a foundation for studying phenomena such as neural plasticity.

Publications

• H. Mir, H. Al-Nashash, J. Kortelainen, A. All, “Novel Modeling of Somatosensory Evoked Potentials for the Assessment of Spinal Cord Injury,” IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Vol. 65, Issue 3, pp. 511-520, March 2018.
• A. Olenko, K. Wong, H. Mir and H. Al-Nashash, “Generalised Correlation Index For Quantifying Signal Morphological Similarity,” IET Electronic Letters,  Vol. 52, Issue 22,  pp. 1832–1834, October 2016.
• E. Väyrynen, K. Noponen, A Vipin, X Thow, H. Al-Nashash, J. Kortelainen, A. All, “Automatic Parameterization of Somatosensory Evoked Potentials with Chirp Modeling,” IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, DOI 10.1109/TNSRE.2016.2525829, February 2016.
• J. Kortelainen, Hasan Al-Nashash, Ashwati Vipin, Xin Yuan Thow and Angelo All, “The Effect of Anesthesia on Somatosensory Evoked Potential Measurement in a Rat Model,” Laboratory Animals, DOI: 10.1177/0023677215589514, June 2015.
• V Ashwati, J. Kortelainen, Hasan Al-Nashash, S. Min, X. Thow, J. Manivannan, A. Rusly, N. Thakor, C Kerr, A. All, “Prolonged Local Hypothermia Has No Long-Term Adverse Effect on the Spinal Cord,” Therapeutic Hypothermia and Temperature Management, Vol. 5, No. 3, June 2015.
• Hasan Mir, Hasan Al-Nashash, T. Thow Xin Yuan, J. Kortelainen, S.M. Chua, J. Manivannan, A. Astrid, A.H. All, “Assessment of Bilateral SSEP Signals Enhancement following Transectional Spinal Cord Injury Using Linear Modeling” World Congress on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, January 2015.
• Jukka Kortelainen, Ashwati Vipin, Xin Thow, Hasan Mir, Nitish Thakor, Hasan Al-Nashash, Angelo All, “Effect of Isoflurane on Somatosensory Evoked Potentials in a Rat Model,” Proceedings of the IEEE-EMBC Conference EMBC’14, Chicago, August 2014.
• Jukka Kortelainen, Ashwati Vipin, Hasan Al-Nashash, Angelo All, “Somatosensory Evoked Potentials for Monitoring Long-Term Effect of Semi-Invasive Local Hypothermia Treatment on Spinal Cord,” IEEE-EMBS International Conferences on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI),” Spain, June, 2014.
• H. Mir, Hasan Al-Nashash, Douglas Kerr, Angelo All, Nitish Thakor, “Using Variations of Somatosensory Evoked Potentials to Quantify Spinal Cord Injury Level,” Engineering, Vol. 5 No. 10B, pp. 99-102. DOI: 10.4236/eng.2013.510B020, 2013.
• Al-Nashash, H. et. al., "Quantitative Assessment of Spinal Cord Injury." In Distributed Diagnosis and Home Healthcare (D2H2), edited by EYK Ng, Raj and Toshiyo Tamura, Library of Congress Control Number: 2009937545. USA: American Scientific Publishers, Vol. 3, ISBN: 1-58883-237-6, 2011.
• H. Mir, H. Al-Nashash, D. Kerr, A. All and N. Thakor, “Spinal Cord Injury Evaluation Using Morphological Difference of Somatosensory Evoked Potentials,” Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering (iCBBE 2011), China, 2011.
• H. Mir, H. Al-Nashash, A. All and N. Thakor, “Quantification of Spinal Cord Injury Level Using Somatosensory Evoked Potentials,” Accepted for publication in the Fourth International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering (iCBBE 2010), China, 2010.
• H. Mir, H. Al-Nashash, D. Kerr, N. Thakor and A. All, “Histogram Based Quantification of Spinal Cord Injury Level Using Somatosensory Evoked Potentials,” 32nd Annual International IEEE EMBS Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society in Argentina, 2010.
• H. Al-Nashash, N. Fatoo, N. Mirza, R. Ahmed, G. Agrawala, N. Thakor and A. All, “Spinal Cord Injury Detection and Monitoring Using Spectral Coherence,” IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Vol. 56, No. 8, pp. 1971-1979, August, 2009.
• Al-Nashash, H. et. al., “Single-Channel EEG Analysis. In Quantitative EEG Analysis Methods and Clinical Applications,” Edited by Shanbao Tong and Nitish V. Thakor, Artech House Publishers, MA, USA, 2009.
• Noreen Fatoo, Nabil Mirza, Rabi Ahmad, Hasan Al-Nashash, Homayoun Naeini and Nitish Thakor, “Detection and Assessment of Spinal Cord Injury Using Spectral Coherence,” 29th Annual International Conference of IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology, pp. 1426–1429, France, August 2007.
• Angelo All, Noreen Fatoo, Nabil Mirza, Rabi Ahmed, Hasan Al-Nashash and Nitish Thakor, “Detection and Monitoring of Spinal Cord Injury By Analysis of Spectral Coherence,” Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE GCC Conference, Bahrain, 2007.