Thesis
Identifying the neurorehabilitation paradigm closest to the natural voluntary gait in healthy mice
Master of Science (M.S.), Drexel University
Jun 2018
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17918/00001211
Abstract
According to National Institute of Health (NIH) (Spinal cord injury: hope through research, 2013), 12,000 spinal cord injuries occur in United States every year. More than a quarter of a million Americans are currently living with spinal cord injuries. There are currently no effective means to promote repair of injured spinal cord tissue. However, the neuronal structures necessary to allow standing and stepping are located below the site of SCI, and can be reactivated with training. In patients with chronic spinal cord injury, activity-based therapy has been seen to improve walking performance in adults. The general rehabilitation strategy to regain locomotor ability after SCI has been based on the principles of motor learning, including task-specificity, task-variability, feedback information and the intensity of training provided. Therefore, this study aimed to identify rehabilitation strategies that closely resemble the natural gait pattern of the lower limbs during locomotion in mice. Healthy mice were trained for several weeks before kinematic recordings were acquired for four neurorehabilitation paradigms: runway quadrupedal, runway bipedal (with the neurorehabilitation robot), treadmill quadrupedal and treadmill bipedal. Two different data analysis strategies provided converging results indicating that the treadmill quadrupedal paradigm was the closest to the runway quadrupedal or natural gait of the mice. Additionally, runway bipedal (with neurorehabilitation robot) appeared to be the furthest away from the natural gait of the mice. However, in contrast to these results, the findings from studies with injured mice showed significant improvement through the runway bipedal paradigm (with the neurorehabilitation robot) because it pushed the mice to perform voluntary locomotion as opposed to the treadmill bipedal or treadmill quadrupedal paradigm. It will be interesting to look at the neuronal circuits involved in healthy mice and injured mice for all the four paradigms along with the kinematic analysis to understand the functional mechanisms of neurorehabilitation after spinal cord injury in detail.
Metrics
21 File views/ downloads
21 Record Views
Details
- Title
- Identifying the neurorehabilitation paradigm closest to the natural voluntary gait in healthy mice
- Creators
- Nidhi Kumar
- Contributors
- Fred D. Allen Jr. (Advisor) - Drexel University, School of Biomedical Engineering, Science, and Health Systems
- Awarding Institution
- Drexel University
- Degree Awarded
- Master of Science (M.S.)
- Publisher
- Drexel University; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Number of pages
- xii, 64 pages
- Resource Type
- Thesis
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- School of Biomedical Engineering, Science, and Health Systems (1997-2026); Drexel University
- Other Identifier
- 7972; 991018931815204721