Abstract
After spinal cord injury (SCI), motor commands from the brain are unable to reach peripheral nerves and muscles below the level of the lesion. Action observation (AO), in which a person observes someone else performing an action, has been used to augment traditional rehabilitation paradigms. Similarly, AO can be used to derive the relationship between brain activity and movement kinematics for a motor-based brain-computer interface (BCI) even when the user cannot generate overt movements. BCIs use brain signals to control external devices to replace functions that have been lost due to SCI or other motor impairment. Previous studies have reported congruent motor cortical activity during observed and overt movements using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Recent single-unit studies using intracortical microelectrodes also demonstrated that a large number of motor cortical neurons had similar firing rate patterns between overt and observed movements. Given the increasing interest in electrocorticography (ECoG)-based BCIs, our goal was to identify whether action observation-related cortical activity could be recorded using ECoG during grasping tasks. Specifically, we aimed to identify congruent neural activity during observed and executed movements in both the sensorimotor rhythm (10–40 Hz) and the high-gamma band (65–115 Hz) which contains significant movement-related information. We observed significant motor-related high-gamma band activity during AO in both able-bodied individuals and one participant with a complete C4 SCI. Furthermore, in able-bodied participants, both the low and high frequency bands demonstrated congruent activity between action execution and observation. Our results suggest that AO could be an effective and critical procedure for deriving the mapping from ECoG signals to intended movement for an ECoG-based BCI system for individuals with paralysis.
Highlights
Brain computer-interfaces (BCIs) transform brain activity into control signals for external devices including computers, communication aids, and prostheses (Wolpaw et al, 2002)
This work extends the findings of others who observed congruence in the low frequency band during action execution (AE) and Action observation (AO) in MEG and EEG studies (Hari et al, 1998; Muthukumaraswamy et al, 2004; Caetano et al, 2007; Perry and Bentin, 2009; Press et al, 2011)
The mirror neuron system formally includes a subset of neurons in the inferior parietal lobe, ventral premotor cortex, and inferior frontal gyrus
Summary
Brain computer-interfaces (BCIs) transform brain activity into control signals for external devices including computers, communication aids, and prostheses (Wolpaw et al, 2002). Decoding weights can be calculated using motor cortical activity and the associated overt movement (Taylor et al, 2002; Wang et al, 2010a). This is not practical for clinical BCI systems as the targeted BCI users are often individuals who are unable to generate overt movement due to conditions such as spinal cord injury (SCI), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or upper limb amputation. An alternative strategy for identifying the neuromotor map is to use motor cortical activity associated with action observation (AO) (Tkach et al, 2008; Velliste et al, 2008; Dushanova and Donoghue, 2010). Previous studies using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) have shown a decrease in sensorimotor rhythm (10–30 Hz) power during both action execution and observation
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