Information For Patients

The brain and spinal cord branches out to all parts of the body and can transmit electrical signals in both directions -- from the brain to the feet and from the feet back to the brain. To monitor all electrical signals of this nervous system means that we can record activity from your nerves (called Evoked Potentials or EPs), muscles (called Electromyography or EMG), and from the spinal cord (called Sensory Evoked Potentials or Motor Evoked Potentials), along with brain activity from your scalp (called Electroencephalography or EEG). The key to providing instantaneous information about your nervous system, and adequacy of blood flow to these structures, is to incorporate an assortment of neurodiagnostic tests to determine how the nervous system is functioning as the surgery is being performed.

Please ask your surgeon before scheduling your surgery if you can have neuromonitoring performed during the procedure by a certified monitoring technician who will be checking the responses from all your neural pathways. Learn more at spineuniversity.com.