Evaluation of brain function in severe human head trauma with multimodality evoked potentials

Abstract

Methods for obtaining multimodality evoked potentials, somatosensory, visual and auditory, and auditory brain-stem potentials in patients with severe head trauma were described. A method of analyzing abnormal multimodality evoked potentials (graded evoked brain-injury potentials) was proposed that defined the degree of abnormality of the electrophysiological data and expressed it simply in 4 grades per modality. Data from 20 normal subjects were given for comparison with the abnormal data obtained from 51 patients with head trauma.