Journal: Cerebral Cortex (New York, NY)

Article Title: Direct Electrical Stimulation of Premotor Areas: Different Effects on Hand Muscle Activity during Object Manipulation

doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhz139

Figure Lengend Snippet: ( A ) 1: schematic representation of HMt execution. 2, 3 and 4: examples of EMG activity from the muscles recorded during HMt execution (APB; FDI; EDC) in 3 different patients. On the right side of each muscle, activity is shown by the level of autocorrelation of the fundamental frequency extracted by the EMG envelope. On the EMG activity of each muscle, the vertical green dashed line indicates the time in which the patient approached the object (shaping). The time between green vertical dashed lines indicates the time required by each patient to shape the fingers immediately before the contact with the object, to grasp it, to rotate it and turning back to the initial shaping phase. ( B ) 1: Cortical distribution of the effective (red) and ineffective (black) sites on the 3D FSAverage template overlapped with functional subdivision of the motor (BA4 upper limb (BA4ul) in dashed gray line, ) and dPM (in dashed blue line, ) and vPM (in dashed yellow line, ). 2: The same template shows the sampling density of stimulated sites within the investigated areas.

Article Snippet: In compliance with the clinical procedure the EMG activity of all muscles, including the muscles selected for the study, was recorded during HMt (ISIS, INOMED, sampling rate 2000 Hz, notch filter at 50 Hz).

Techniques: Activity Assay, Muscles, Functional Assay, Sampling

Journal: Scientific Reports

Article Title: Design and effectiveness evaluation of mirror myoelectric interfaces: a novel method to restore movement in hemiplegic patients

doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-34785-x

Figure Lengend Snippet: Steps to follow to build and use a mirror myoelectric decoder: (1) Calibration session: EMG and kinematic data are recorded from the healthy upper limb during different functional movements with the exoskeleton. (2) The recorded data is used to calibrate a mirror EMG decoder (i.e. build a healthy EMG-kinematics mirror model). (3) The EMG activity recorded from the paretic limb during the real-time phase is fed to the mirror decoder. The latter is able to map the input EMG signal into the corresponding kinematics based on the mirror myoelectric model of healthy activity. The estimated kinematics are sent as control commands to the exoskeleton, which drives the movement of the paretic upper limb of the patient, providing him/her with visual and proprioceptive feedback.

Article Snippet: In healthy participants, EMG activity was recorded at 2500 Hz (Brain Products GmbH, Germany) from 10 standard bipolar electrodes with an inter-electrode distance of 2.2 cm (Myotronics-Noromed, USA) over: (1) the abductor pollicis longus, (2) the extensor carpi ulnaris, (3) the extensor digitorium, (4) the flexor carpi radialis, palmaris longus and flexor carpi ulnaris, (5) the pronator teres, (6) the long head of the biceps, (7) the external head of the triceps, (8) the anterior portion of the deltoid, (9) the lateral portion of the deltoid and (10) the posterior portion of the deltoid over the teres minor and infraespinatus muscles.

Techniques: Functional Assay, Activity Assay, Control