Altered Sensorimotor Cortical Activities During Forearm Movement in Humans With Spinal Cord Injury

Decoding the motor intention by electroencephalography to control external devices is an effective method of helping spinal cord injury (SCI) patients to regain motor function. Still, SCI patients have much lower accuracy in the decoding of motor intentions compared to healthy individuals, which severely hampers the clinical application. However, the underlying neural mechanisms are still unknown. The aim of this paper is to investigate changes in cortical activities after SCI, which are direct determinants of motor decoding performance.

We performed source localization analyses to investigate the changes in motor-related cortical regions after SCI. Moreover, we measured the power spectral density values and event-related spectral perturbation values to assess the characteristics of the changes in cortical potentials.

We found that motor-related independent component clusters decreased while attempting upper limb movement after SCI. Additionally, the activities in the sensorimotor cortex obviously attenuated after SCI. theta, alpha, and beta band power modulation obviously altered in SCI individuals. Furthermore, the latency of the largest power increase or decrease between SCI and healthy individuals demonstrated obvious differences.

Our findings revealed changes in motor-related cortical areas after SCI, which were crucial for improving the accuracy of motor intention decoding and advancing the clinical application.