Fast extraction of somatosensory evoked potential based on second order blind identification.

Second order blind identification (SOBI) technique is a promising independent component analysis (ICA) method to extract somatosensory evoked potential (SEP). This simulation study focused on SEP extraction from EEG and power-line noise contaminated SEP signals at signal to noise ratio (SNR) of -10dB and -20dB. The correlation coefficients between template SEP and SOBI extracted SEP showed significant high similarity (r>0.76) at -10dB and mild acceptable similarity (r>0.6) at -20dB EEG contaminated SEP. However, SOBI extracted SEP showed good performance in power-line noise situation to achieve high correlation coefficients with template SEP (r=0.96). The fast extracted SEP showed stable amplitude and latency, which are almost identical with the SEP template. The results suggested that SOBI is an appropriate method to extract SEP from noisy background.