Logo image
Skilled hindlimb reaching task in rats as a platform for a brain-machine interface to restore motor function after complete spinal cord injury
Journal article

Skilled hindlimb reaching task in rats as a platform for a brain-machine interface to restore motor function after complete spinal cord injury

Eric B Knudsen, Karen A Moxon, Elliot B Sturgis and Jed S Shumsky
Conference proceedings (IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Conf.), v 2011, pp 6315-6318
2011
PMID: 22255782

Abstract

Motor Activity - physiology User-Computer Interface Movement Motor Skills - physiology Rats, Long-Evans Rats Male Hindlimb - physiopathology Animals Time Factors Vision, Ocular Brain - pathology Recovery of Function - physiology Spinal Cord Injuries - rehabilitation Spinal Cord - physiopathology Spinal Cord Injuries - physiopathology Locomotion - physiology
Behavioral tasks utilized as models for decoding neural activity for use in brain-machine interfaces are constrained primarily to forelimb tasks or locomotion. We present here our methodology for training adult rats in a novel skilled hindlimb 'reaching' task in which the animal is trained to make different types of hindlimb movements. 6 adult Long-Evans rats were trained to make variable duration (<1 or >1.5 s) hindlimb presses cued by a spatially-independent visual cue. 5 of 6 animals (83.3%) were able to learn the task to proficiency. The training paradigm introduced here serves as a platform to investigate the ability of the animal to transfer motor cortical activity in response to a cue originally generated during normal movments, to a novel context in the absecense of movement and ultimately after complete mid-thoracic spinal cord transection. We also present preliminary results of offline classification of neural activity during trial performance for two trained animals.

Metrics

9 Record Views
6 citations in Scopus

Details

InCites Highlights

Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:

Web of Science research areas
Engineering, Biomedical
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
Logo image