Quantitative analysis of neural plasticity in motorcortex during functional recovery post spinal cord injury

The impact of spinal cord injury (SCI) on potential functional reorganization in neuronal populations in motor cortical areas remains unknown, though its influence on functional recovery may be significant. The cortical neuronal data was recorded from a monkey while it was trained to walk bipedally on a treadmill both before and after spinal cord injury. By using the correlation coefficients between different neurons, we constructed graphs for multiple steps in different sessions. The global efficiency of the graph was then calculated to investigate the effect of SCI on the neuronal activity patterns and how the correlation between the neurons changes as the functional recovery continued. Our results indicate that the observed significant changes in neuronal activity patterns in the motor cortex, although preliminary, suggest that the patterns of functional reorganization (neural plasticity) in motor areas of the cortex correlate and contribute to the functional recovery.