Dentists must be skilled when using dental mirrors. Working with mirrors requires spatial perception, bimanual coordination, perceptual learning and fine motor skills. Many studies have attempted to determine the predictors of manual skills among pre-clinical students, but consensus has yet to be reached. We hypothesized that valid and reliable occupational therapy test performance regarding in...

BACKGROUND Although cell therapy is a promising approach after cerebral cortex lesion, few studies assess quantitatively its behavioral gain in nonhuman primates. Furthermore, implantations of fetal grafts of exogenous stem cells are limited by safety and ethical issues. OBJECTIVE To test in nonhuman primates the transplantation of autologous adult neural progenitor cortical cells with assess...

The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of dexterity on the magnitude of signal changes in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the cervical spinal cord with unilateral finger-tapping. Right-handed healthy volunteers were investigated with blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI. Spinal cord BOLD functional MR images were acquired from 10 healthy right-handed ...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of two different treatment interventions, neurodevelopmental treatment (NDT) and practicing of specific functional activity, on improving the gross manual dexterity of the affected upper extremity in spastic hemiparetic cerebral palsied children. Thirty children with spastic hemiparetic cerebral palsy (CP) participated in the study, rangin...

Exercise, such as cardiovascular fitness training, has been shown to have utility in improving executive function but is difficult for older adults with low mobility to perform. Accordingly, there is interest in the development of regimens other than high mobility exercises for older adults with low mobility. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the association between sensory motor fun...

Music-supported therapy (MST) is an innovative approach that was shown to improve manual dexterity in acute stroke survivors. The feasibility of such intervention in chronic stroke survivors and its longer-term benefits, however, remain unknown. The objective of this pilot study was to estimate the short- and long-term effects of a 3-week piano training program on upper extremity function in pe...

In this work we take a new approach to the determination of the quantified contribution of various attributes of the human hand to its dexterity, with the aim of transposing this knowledge into supportive guidelines for the design of anthropomorphic robotic and prosthetic hands. We have carried out a number of standard dexterity tests on normal human subjects with various physical constraints a...

Manual dexterity, a prerogative of primates, is under the control of the corticospinal (CS) tract. Because 90-95% of CS axons decussate, it is assumed that this control is exerted essentially on the contralateral hand. Consistently, unilateral lesion of the hand representation in the motor cortex is followed by a complete loss of dexterity of the contralesional hand. During the months following...