A New Method for Functional Evaluation of Motor Commands in Patients with Cerebellar Ataxia

Quantitative evaluation of motor functions of patients with cerebellar ataxia is vital for evidence-based treatments and has been a focus in previous investigations of movement kinematics. Due to redundancy of the musculoskeletal system, muscle activities contain more information than the movement kinematics. Therefore, it is preferable to analyze causal anomalies of muscle activities to evaluate motor functions in patients. Here we propose a new method to evaluate the motor functions at the level of muscle activities and movement kinematics. Nineteen patients and 10 control subjects performed two movement tasks of the wrist joint, a step-tracking task and a pursuit task, with a manipulandum. The movements of the wrist joint and activities of the four wrist prime movers were recorded. We developed a linear model for the wrist joint to approximate the causal relationship between muscle activities and movement kinematics in terms of the wrist joint torque. We used a canonical correlation analysis to verify the causality between the muscle activities and the movement kinematics in the model. We found that the activities of the four muscles were related almost entirely to the position and velocity, with negligible correlation with the acceleration of the wrist joint. Moreover, the ratio of the weights for position- and velocity-related torque components characterized the contents of the muscle activities in terms of the movement kinematics. Next, we compared the ratios for the two movement tasks between the controls and patients. In control subjects, the ratios indicated clear task-specific changes that conformed to the functional requirements of the tasks. In contrast, in patients, the task-specific changes diminished highly significantly. The present results indicate that this ability to accommodate motor commands to the task requirements provides a novel quantitative parameter to characterize motor functions in patients with cerebellar ataxia.