Vibratory Evoked Potentials

摘要

Numerous pathologies in medicine are characterized with deficit related to deep sense. Diagnostic methods currently used for testing features of deep sense in individuals are extremely subjective and depend on patients' co-operability, which is not always possible, especially with patients in coma, patients who are not able to communicate or small children. The goal of this research is to examine functional integrity of the whole sensory pathway related to vibratory sense, from their receptors to the primary cortex in order to establish reliable and objective method for exploring the features of deep sense. Optimal stimulation frequency according to literature and presented experimental results is 120 Hz. Cortical activity evoked by vibratory stimulation is easily detectable from the somatosensory cortex and achieves results in the same time window as widely used and established method, electrical somatosensory evoked potentials. Our methodology enables early primary cortical activation detection, that is necessary for quantitative assessment of whole vibratory pathway evaluation. Further experiments with larger number of participants are necessary to enable breakthrough of this method in everyday clinical practice.