Stability and distribution of steady-state somatosensory evoked potentials elicited by vibro-tactile stimulation

Steady-state somatosensory evoked potentials (SSSEPs) have been elicited applying vibro-tactile stimulation to all fingertips of the right hand. Nine healthy subjects participated in two sessions within this study. All fingers were stimulated 40 times with a 200-Hz carrier frequency modulated with a rectangular signal. The frequencies of the rectangular signal ranged between 17 and 35 Hz in 2 Hz steps. Relative band power tuning curves were calculated, introducing two different methods. Person-specific resonance-like frequencies were selected based on the data from the first session. The selected resonance-like frequencies were compared with the second session using an ANOVA for repeated measures to investigate the stability of SSSEPs over time. To determine, if SSSEPs can be classified with a classifier based on unseen data, an LDA classifier was trained with data from the first and applied to data from the second session. Person-specific resonance-like frequencies within a range from 19 to 29 Hz were found. The relative band power of the resonance-like frequencies did not differ significantly between the two sessions. Significant differences were found for the two methods and the used channels. SSSEPs were classified with a hit rate from 51 to 96 %.