Patent ID: 8374673

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a hand-held surgical instrument configured to apply an electrostimulation to induce a neurological response for a neural monitoring system wherein the electrostimulation is automatically adjusted based on the real-time positioning of the hand-held surgical instrument; an integrated system comprising: an instrument tracking system configured to track a real-time positioning of the hand-held surgical instrument, and the neural monitoring system configured to conduct real-time neuromonitoring during a surgical procedure; a database containing pre-acquired images of an anatomical structure and technical information regarding the surgical procedure and patient anatomy; a graphical user interface (GUI); a computer operatively linked with the instrument tracking system, the neural monitoring system, the surgical instrument, the database, and a display terminal, the computer programmed to: determine an anticipated trajectory of the hand-held instrument and display the anticipated trajectory on the GUI; display on the display terminal the pre-acquired images of the anatomical structure, the pre-acquired images of the anatomical structure including an image of a nerve structure; receive data relating to a measured neurological response of a portion of the nerve structure of the anatomical structure; determine a predicted structure of the nerve structure based on a measured neurological response of a portion of the nerve structure; display on the display terminal the predicted structure over the pre-acquired images such that the predicted structure supplements the image of the pre-acquired nerve structure to provide a real-time structural view of the nerve structure in its entirety; automatically identify and determine based on the positioning of the instrument with respect to the anatomical structure, a portion of the technical information contained on the database that relates to the anatomical structure; and generate and display identifiers for the portion of the technical information in a user-selectable manner to allow a user to selectively obtain technical information relating to the surgical procedure and the anatomical structure.