Equipment, Recording Techniques, Data Analysis, and Stimulation

Abstract

In the early days of intraoperative monitoring, either custom-made equipment or equipment taken from the clinical testing laboratory or the neurophysiological animal laboratories was used in the operating room. Now, there is specialized equipment commercially available for nearly all needs of intraoperative monitoring. This means that the persons who do monitoring do not need to know as much about recording and stimulating equipment as they did earlier. However, knowledge about the basic function of the equipment that is used for intraoperative monitoring is an advantage for optimal use of the equipment and for troubleshooting. The equipment now used for intraoperative monitoring is capable of appropriate signal processing and it has several possibilities for filtering the recorded responses. The user must have sufficient knowledge about the basis for filtering and signal averaging to use these methods in optimal ways. Modern equipment also have many options for display of recorded potentials.