The utilization and importance of Neuromonitoring in hospital or intensive care set up was reviewed elaborately 32 years ago during 1985. Did anything change or how much change has took place in this field is quite interesting, while basic principles and intraoperative modalities discussed remain pretty much same today as 32 years ago, IONM field did make lots of progress ever since, better tests, analysis and interpretation of results got savvy and reliable upto 96-99% accuracy than it was during1985. Advancements in terms of application in various surgical procedure and combinatorial tests to yield better results, some newer techniques, and the entire hardware/machine technology certainly been upgraded to fit the Operating Room environment.
W.Hacks, the author of this review from the then FRG (West Germany, no longer the case after 90s unified Germany) made a remarkable attempt to provide insights 32 years ago. The review has been published in "Journal of Neurology (interestingly, the very first issue of this journal was published way back in the year 1891 that continued till today with the same name Journal of Neurology Volume 1 / 1891 - Volume 259 / 2012), quite an respectable journal in the field of neurology, it is still exist with the same name with a significant impact factor score of 3.85, ranked 33 among 185 clinical neurology journals [The top five Neurology journals are rated as follows: (Neurology, Brain, Annals of Neurology, Journal of Neurotrauma, and Stroke, for an interesting review of these top journals, click here LINK).
Here is the link to the partial or one page review available at the bottom of this abstract, it is a pay per view article, only one page is viewable for non subscribers.
Abstract
Neuromonitoring—the continuous or intermittent observation of nervous system functions—has become a field of interdisciplinary interest. Basically there are two major applications of neuromonitoring: in the operating theatre and the neurological or neurosurgical intensive care unit. Evoked potential recording, intracranial pressure measurement, serial EEG recording, cerebral blood flow measurement and ultrasound techniques have all been used as monitoring methods. The application of these techniques for operations, intensive care and the evaluation of brain death will be described.
Key words Neuromonitoring - Intraoperative monitoring - Evoked potential monitoring - Spinal cord monitoring - Brain death
