Abstract
This study explored the effect of kinesthetic motor imagery training on reaching-to-grasp movement supplemented by a virtual environment in a patient with congenital bilateral transverse upper-limb deficiency. Based on a theoretical assumption, it is possible to conduct such training in this patient. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether cortical activity related to motor imagery of reaching and motor imagery of grasping of the right upper limb was changed by computer-aided imagery training (CAIT) in a patient who was born without upper limbs compared to a healthy control subject, as characterized by multi-channel electroencephalography (EEG) signals recorded before and 4, 8, and 12 weeks after CAIT. The main task during CAIT was to kinesthetically imagine the execution of reaching-to-grasp movements without any muscle activation, supplemented by computer visualization of movements provided by a special headset. Our experiment showed that CAIT can be conducted in the patient with higher vividness of imagery for reaching than grasping tasks. Our results confirm that CAIT can change brain activation patterns in areas related to motor planning and the execution of reaching and grasping movements, and that the effect was more pronounced in the patient than in the healthy control subject. The results show that CAIT has a different effect on the cortical activity related to the motor imagery of a reaching task than on the cortical activity related to the motor imagery of a grasping task. The change observed in the activation patterns could indicate CAIT-induced neuroplasticity, which could potentially be useful in rehabilitation or brain-computer interface purposes for such patients, especially before and after transplantation. This study was part of a registered experiment (ID: NCT04048083).
Highlights
Motor imagery is defined as the conscious, mental simulation of an action without any body movement (Jeannerod, 1994; Jeannerod and Decety, 1995)
We describe cortical activity associated with the motor imagery of reaching (MIR) and the motor imagery of grasping (MIG) by a patient with a congenital bilateral transverse upper-limb deficiency compared with that of a healthy control subject, as characterized by electroencephalography (EEG) signals recorded before computer-aided imagery training (CAIT) and after 4, 8, and 12 weeks of training
The aims of this study were (i) to evaluate whether cortical activity related to MIR and MIG of the right upper limb was changed by CAIT in a patient with congenital bilateral transverse upper-limb deficiency and a healthy control subject and (ii) to compare the effects of CAIT on the motor imagery of two different mental tasks: reaching and grasping
Summary
Motor imagery is defined as the conscious, mental simulation of an action without any body movement (Jeannerod, 1994; Jeannerod and Decety, 1995). Motor imagery plays an important role in motor skill learning (Mokienko et al, 2013; Cabral-Sequeira et al, 2016; Sobierajewicz et al, 2016) and rehabilitation (Mulder, 2007; Ietswaart et al, 2011; Harris and Hebert, 2015). It is used in the brain-computer interface field (Ortner et al, 2012; Mokienko et al, 2013; Teo and Chew, 2014)
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