BACKGROUND Chronic hemiplegia is a common long-term consequence of stroke, and subsequent motor recovery is often incomplete. Neurophysiological studies have focused on motor execution deficits in relatively high functioning patients. Much less is known about the influence exerted by processes related to motor preparation, particularly in patients with poor motor recovery. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIP...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Studies of cerebral activation of motor function after ischemic stroke may enhance our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of motor functional recovery, including the role of the noninfarcted hemisphere. METHODS Eight right-handed recovering hemiparetic or hemiplegic patients were studied using functional MRI. Results were evaluated for each patient to consider i...

OBJECTIVE Stroke is a leading cause of long-term motor disability. Stroke patients with severe hand weakness do not profit from rehabilitative treatments. Recently, brain-controlled robotics and sequential functional electrical stimulation allowed some improvement. However, for such therapies to succeed, it is required to decode patients' intentions for different arm movements. Here, we evaluat...

Disabilities after neural injury, such as stroke, bring tremendous burden to patients, families and society. Besides the conventional constrained-induced training with a paretic arm, bilateral rehabilitation training involves both the ipsilateral and contralateral sides of the neural injury, fitting well with the fact that both arms are needed in common activities of daily living (ADLs), and ca...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The mechanism of reorganization after stroke remains uncertain. Several studies that have measured reaction time (RT) delay by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) have revealed some substrates responsible for the reorganization of motor recovery. In this study, we evaluated the RT delay and inhibitory functions by examining the silent period (SP) in the primary motor ...

Impaired motor and sensory function is common in the upper limb in humans after cerebrovascular stroke and it often remains as a permanent disability. Functional electrical stimulation therapy is known to enhance the motor function of the paretic hand; however, the mechanism of this enhancement is not known. We studied whether neural plasticity has a role in this therapy-induced enhancement of ...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to compare the torque production in the paretic and non-paretic hands during isokinetic tasks following stroke. METHODS We compared torque and power production at the MCP joint of chronic stroke survivors during isometric and isokinetic tasks. We also recorded surface electromyography (EMG) activity in the forearm muscles. RESULTS Isokinetic torque pr...

F unctional impairment is a powerful incentive for behav-ioral change. The natural response to disability in one limb is to learn new ways of using the other limb. Animals, including humans, with upper extremity impairments spontaneously learn to use the less-affected (nonparetic) hand in novel ways to perform daily activities. In intact brains, the acquisition of manual skills depends on pract...

This study presents wavelet packet feature assessment of neural control information in paretic upper limb muscles of stroke survivors for myoelectric pattern recognition, taking advantage of high-resolution time-frequency representations of surface electromyogram (EMG) signals. On this basis, a novel channel selection method was developed by combining the Fisher's class separability index and t...