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Open Access 01-05-2018 | Original Paper

Disentangling Somatosensory Evoked Potentials of the Fingers: Limitations and Clinical Potential

Authors: Konstantina Kalogianni, Andreas Daffertshofer, Frans C. T. van der Helm, Alfred C. Schouten, Jan C. de Munck, on behalf of the 4DEEG consortium

Published in: Brain Topography | Issue 3/2018

Abstract

In searching for clinical biomarkers of the somatosensory function, we studied reproducibility of somatosensory potentials (SEP) evoked by finger stimulation in healthy subjects. SEPs induced by electrical stimulation and especially after median nerve stimulation is a method widely used in the literature. It is unclear, however, if the EEG recordings after finger stimulation are reproducible within the same subject. We tested in five healthy subjects the consistency and reproducibility of responses through bootstrapping as well as test–retest recordings. We further evaluated the possibility to discriminate activity of different fingers both at electrode and at source level. The lack of consistency and reproducibility suggest responses to finger stimulation to be unreliable, even with reasonably high signal-to-noise ratio and adequate number of trials. At sources level, somatotopic arrangement of the fingers representation was only found in one of the subjects. Although finding distinct locations of the different fingers activation was possible, our protocol did not allow for non-overlapping dipole representations of the fingers. We conclude that despite its theoretical advantages, we cannot recommend the use of somatosensory potentials evoked by finger stimulation to extract clinical biomarkers.

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Title: Disentangling Somatosensory Evoked Potentials of the Fingers: Limitations and Clinical Potential
Authors: Konstantina Kalogianni
Andreas Daffertshofer
Frans C. T. van der Helm
Alfred C. Schouten
Jan C. de Munck
on behalf of the 4DEEG consortium
Publication date: 01-05-2018
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Brain Topography / Issue 3/2018
Print ISSN: 0896-0267
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6792
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-017-0617-4

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