In vivo intraoperative hypoglossal nerve stimulation for quantitative tongue motion analysis

This is the first study quantitatively measuring tongue motion in 3D after in vivo intraoperative neurostimulation of the hypoglossal nerve and its branches during a neck dissection procedure. Firstly, this study is performed to show whether this set-up is suitable for innervating different muscles or muscle groups with an identifiable corresponding motion pattern by stimulating the main stem and the visible branches and by performing an intra-patient comparison over the captured 3D trajectories. Secondly, an inter-patient comparison is performed to analyse if similar branches lead to comparable movements of the tongue tip. Our results showed the measurement set-up works, and that we are able to capture distinguishable trajectories for different branches. The inter-patient comparison showed a poor match in trajectories for similar branches, which could be an indication of the presence of several anatomical variations between individuals.