Intra Operative NeuroPhysiological Monitoring- IONM

Spinal Stimulation Gets Paralyzed Patients Moving By Emily Waltz Posted 24 Oct 2013 | 15:01 GMT A few months after being discharged from the hospital, in May 2011, Shillcox saw a news report announcing that researchers had for the first time enabled a paralyzed person to stand on his own. Neuroscientist Susan Harkema at the University of Louisville, in Kentucky, used electrical stimulation to “awaken” the man’s lower spinal cord, and on the first day of the experiments he stood up, able to support all of his weight with just some minor assistance to stay balanced. The stimulation also enabled the subject, 23-year-old Rob Summers , to voluntarily move his legs in other ways. Later, he regained some control of his bladder, bowel, and sexual functions, even when the electrodes were turned off. The breakthrough , published in The Lancet , shocked doctors who had previously tried electrically stimulating the spinal nerves of experimental animals and people with spinal-co

Deep Brain Stimulation Improves Paralyzed Rat's Gait By Emily Waltz Posted 23 Oct 2013 | 19:26 GMT Swiss researchers have enabled rats with severe spinal cord injuries to walk and swim by electrically stimulating a group of neurons located deep in the brain. The discovery may give researchers a new approach to treating severe spinal cord injury. The research, led by Lukas Bachmann at the Brain Research Institute at the University of Zurich, was published today in Science Translational Medicine. In most spinal cord injuries, some nerve fibers connecting the brain to the spinal cord below the injury site remain intact, even in severe cases in which a person is paralyzed. Bachmann and his colleagues found that by stimulating a key region of the midbrain called the mesencephalic locomotor region, or MLR, the remaining intact nerve fibers could be recruited to improve walking and swimming movements in spinal-cord injured rats.