Stimulus artifact elimination without discontinuities

• Grant number: 12/08373-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: July 01, 2012
• End date: June 30, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Biomedical Engineering - Bioengineering
• Principal Investigator: Cinthia Itiki
• Grantee: Juliana Cesaro
• Host Institution: Escola Politécnica (EP). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Evoked potentials have wide clinical application. Unfortunately, other biological signals, movement artifacts, electronic noise, power-line interference and stimulus artifacts may hinder their recording. In order to overcome this difficulty, the synchronous averaging of several evoked responses is computed. However, this method does not eliminate stimulus artifacts, since they have greater amplitude than the evoked potential and they are synchronized with the time when the stimulus is applied. For this reason, several methods for stimulus-artifact removal or reduction are described in the literature. Nevertheless, these techniques present discontinuities between neighboring segments in which the techniques have been applied or not. So, this project consists in developing a processing technique that may eliminate the stimulus artifact, showing no discontinuity in the evoked potential estimate.(AU)