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| Author(s): |
Camila Shirota
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Escola Politécnica (EP/BC) |
| Defense date: | 2008-02-19 |
| Examining board members: |
Cinthia Itiki;
Ernane José Xavier Costa;
André Fábio Kohn
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| Advisor: | Cinthia Itiki |
| Abstract | |
Somatosensory evoked potentials are useful to detect and locate lesions in sensory pathways. In order to obtain somatosensory evoked potentials, more than one thousand single sweeps must be synchronously averaged. The smaller the number of electrical stimuli used for evoked potentials, the lower is the examination length and the patient discomfort. The objective of this thesis is to study the contribution potential of two time-frequency techniques (wavelets and filters associated to specific time intervals) to the estimation of somatosensory evoked potentials, when only one hundred individual responses are used. For the filtering technique, it is suggested that two low-pass filters be used. The first filter has a 900Hz cutoff frequency and must be used in the 3ms-35ms time interval. The second one has a 200Hz cutoff frequency and should be applied to the 25ms-60ms section. Regarding wavelet parameters, it is recommended that a biorthogonal 5.5 mother wavelet be used, because it provides smaller errors and the results are visually good. Besides it, this mother wavelet has linear phase, which is useful to the evoked potential processing. The 20% greatest coefficients in D3, D4, D5 scales, and the 50% greatest D6 coefficients are candidates to the reconstruction. Those that fall in specific time intervals are used together with all the A6 coefficients. They reconstruct evoked potentials in a satisfactory manner. The statistical analysis of the normalized squared errors indicates that the wavelet estimation is the best technique among the tested ones. This work also shows that both techniques resulted in the reduction of the normalized squared errors, when compared to the synchronous averaging of 100 individual responses. As a conclusion, both wavelets and filters contribute in a positive manner to improve evoked potential estimation, even when a reduced number of individual responses is used. (AU) | |