Onset detection to study muscle activity in reaching and grasping movements in rats

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.EMG signals reflect the neuromuscular activation patterns related to the execution of a certain movement or task. In this work, we focus on reaching and grasping (R&G) movements in rats. Our objective is to develop an automatic algorithm to detect the onsets and offsets of muscle activity and use it to study muscle latencies in R&G maneuvers. We had a dataset of intramuscular EMG signals containing 51 R&G attempts from 2 different animals. Simultaneous video recordings were used for segmentation and comparison. We developed an automatic onset/offset detector based on the ratio of local maxima of Teager-Kaiser Energy (TKE). Then, we applied it to compute muscle latencies and other features related to the muscle activation pattern during R&G cycles. The automatic onsets that we found were consistent with visual inspection and video labels. Despite the variability between attempts and animals, the two rats shared a sequential pattern of muscle activations. Statistical tests confirmed the differences between the latencies of the studied muscles during R&G tasks. This work provides an automatic tool to detect EMG onsets and offsets and conducts a preliminary characterization of muscle activation during R&G movements in rats. This kind of approaches and data processing algorithms can facilitate the studies on upper limb motor control and motor impairment after spinal cord injury or stroke.Postprint (published version

Cervical Electrical Neuromodulation Effectively Enhances Hand Motor Output in Healthy Subjects by Engaging a Use-Dependent Intervention

Altres ajuts: Fundació La Marató de TV3 2017 (201713.31) to G.G.-A.; Premi Beca "Mike Lane" 2019-Castellers de la Vila de Gràcia to H.K.; and National Institutes of Health Grant 1R01 NS102920-01A1 to Y.G.Electrical enabling motor control (eEmc) through transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation is a non-invasive method that can modify the functional state of the sensory-motor system. We hypothesize that eEmc delivery, together with hand training, improves hand function in healthy subjects more than either intervention alone by inducing plastic changes at spinal and cortical levels. Ten voluntary participants were included in the following three interventions: (i) hand grip training, (ii) eEmc, and (iii) eEmc with hand training. Functional evaluation included the box and blocks test (BBT) and hand grip maximum voluntary contraction (MVC), spinal and cortical motor evoked potential (sMEP and cMEP), and resting motor thresholds (RMT), short interval intracortical inhibition (SICI), and F wave in the abductor pollicis brevis muscle. eEmc combined with hand training retained MVC and increased F wave amplitude and persistency, reduced cortical RMT and facilitated cMEP amplitude. In contrast, eEmc alone only increased F wave amplitude, whereas hand training alone reduced MVC and increased cortical RMT and SICI. In conclusion, eEmc combined with hand grip training enhanced hand motor output and induced plastic changes at spinal and cortical level in healthy subjects when compared to either intervention alone. These data suggest that electrical neuromodulation changes spinal and, perhaps, supraspinal networks to a more malleable state, while a concomitant use-dependent mechanism drives these networks to a higher functional state

Tomar la palabra (II). Intertextualidad e intermedialidad como herramientas pedagógicas para la enseñanza de la literatura y otros discursos

Este proyecto explora las relaciones entre obras literarias y literatura y otras artes (música, pintura, fotografía, cine, etc.) como medio para desarrollar la competencia lectora y expresiva y estimular el disfrute literario en ámbito universitario

CIBERER : Spanish national network for research on rare diseases: A highly productive collaborative initiative

Altres ajuts: Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII); Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.CIBER (Center for Biomedical Network Research; Centro de Investigación Biomédica En Red) is a public national consortium created in 2006 under the umbrella of the Spanish National Institute of Health Carlos III (ISCIII). This innovative research structure comprises 11 different specific areas dedicated to the main public health priorities in the National Health System. CIBERER, the thematic area of CIBER focused on rare diseases (RDs) currently consists of 75 research groups belonging to universities, research centers, and hospitals of the entire country. CIBERER's mission is to be a center prioritizing and favoring collaboration and cooperation between biomedical and clinical research groups, with special emphasis on the aspects of genetic, molecular, biochemical, and cellular research of RDs. This research is the basis for providing new tools for the diagnosis and therapy of low-prevalence diseases, in line with the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium (IRDiRC) objectives, thus favoring translational research between the scientific environment of the laboratory and the clinical setting of health centers. In this article, we intend to review CIBERER's 15-year journey and summarize the main results obtained in terms of internationalization, scientific production, contributions toward the discovery of new therapies and novel genes associated to diseases, cooperation with patients' associations and many other topics related to RD research

Identifying muscle synergies from reaching and grasping movements in rats

Reaching and grasping (R&G) is a skilled voluntary movement which is critical for animals. In this work, we aim to identify muscle synergy patterns from R&G movements in rats and show how these patterns can be used to characterize such movements and investigate their consistency and repeatability. For that purpose, we analyzed the electromyographic (EMG) activity of five forelimb muscles recorded while the animals were engaged in R&G tasks. Our dataset included 200 R&G attempts from three different rats. Non-negative matrix factorization was used to decompose EMG signals and extract muscle synergies. We compared all pairs of attempts and created cross-validated models to study intra- and inter-subject variability. We found that three synergies were enough to accurately reconstruct the EMG envelopes. These muscle synergies and their corresponding activation coefficients were very similar for all the attempts in the database, providing a general pattern to describe the movement. Results suggested that the movement strategy adopted by an individual in its different attempts was highly repetitive, but also resembled the strategies adopted by the other animals. Inter-subject variability was not much higher than intra-subject variability. This study is a proof-of-concept, but the proposed approaches can help to establish whether there is a stereotyped pattern of neuromuscular activity in R&G movement in healthy rats, and the changes that occur in animal models of acute neurological injuries. Research on muscle synergies could elucidate motor control mechanisms, and lead to quantitative tools for evaluating upper limb motor impairment after an injuryPeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Plasticity of subcortical pathways promote recovery of skilled hand function in rats after corticospinal and rubrospinal tract injuries

The corticospinal and rubrospinal tracts are the predominant tracts for controlling skilled hand function. Injuries to these tracts impair grasping but not gross motor functions such as overground locomotion. The aim of the present study was to determine whether or not, after damage to both the corticospinal and rubrospinal tracts, other spared subcortical motor pathway can mediate the recovery of skilled hand function. Adult rats received a bilateral injury to the corticospinal tract at the level of the medullar pyramids and a bilateral ablation of the rubrospinal axons at C4. One group of rats received, acutely after injury, two injections of chondroitinase-ABC at C7, and starting at 7days post-injury were enrolled in daily reaching and grasping rehabilitation (CHASE group, n=5). A second group of rats received analogous injections of ubiquitous penicillinase, and did not undergo rehabilitation (PEN group, n=5). Compared to rats in the PEN group, CHASE rats gradually recovered the ability to reach and grasp over 42days after injury. Overground locomotion was mildly affected after injury and both groups followed similar recovery. Since the reticulospinal tract plays a predominant role in motor control, we further investigated whether or not plasticity of this pathway could contribute to the animal's recovery. Reticulospinal axons were anterogradely traced in both groups of rats. The density of reticulospinal processes in both the normal and ectopic areas of the grey ventral matter of the caudal segments of the cervical spinal cord was greater in the CHASE than PEN group. The results indicate that after damage to spinal tracts that normally mediate the control of reaching and grasping in rats other complementary spinal tracts can acquire the role of those damaged tracts and promote task-specific recovery