Motor network reorganization in stroke patients with dyskinesias during a shoulder-touching task: A fNIRS study

Abstract

Hemiplegia after stroke has become a major cause of the world’s high disabilities, and it is vital to enhance our understanding of post-stroke neuroplasticity to develop efficient rehabilitation programs. This study aimed to explore the brain activation and network reorganization of the motor cortex (MC) with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The MC hemodynamic signals were gained from 22 stroke patients and 14 healthy subjects during a shoulder-touching task with the right hand. The MC activation pattern and network attributes analyzed with the graph theory were compared between the two groups. The results revealed that healthy controls presented dominant activation in the left MC while stroke patients exhibited dominant activation in the bilateral hemispheres MC. The MC networks for the two groups had small-world properties. Compared with healthy controls, patients had higher transitivity and lower global efficiency (GE), mean connectivity, and long connections (LCs) in the left MC. In addition, both MC activation and network attributes were correlated with patient’s upper limb motor function. The results showed the stronger compensation of the unaffected motor area, the better recovery of the upper limb motor function for patients. Moreover, the MC network possessed high clustering and relatively sparse inter-regional connections during recovery for patients. Our results promote the understanding of MC reorganization during recovery and indicate that MC activation and network could provide clinical assessment significance in stroke patients. Given the advantages of fNIRS, it shows great application potential in the assessment and rehabilitation of motor function after stroke.

Cortical activity associated with focal muscle vibration applied directly to the affected forearm flexor muscle in post-stroke patients: an fNIRS study

“…A recent fNIRS study found that touching the affected shoulder in stroke patients can activate both sides of the motor cortex, the intensity of this activation was correlated with the baseline clinical characteristics of the patients. The authors attributed this result to functional compensation in uninjured brain regions ( Zhang et al, 2023 ). This functional compensation is seen both within the affected hemisphere and between the unaffected hemispheres ( Viganò et al, 2023 ; Zhang et al, 2023 ).…”

“…The authors attributed this result to functional compensation in uninjured brain regions ( Zhang et al, 2023 ). This functional compensation is seen both within the affected hemisphere and between the unaffected hemispheres ( Viganò et al, 2023 ; Zhang et al, 2023 ).…”

FNIRS based study of brain network characteristics in children with cerebral palsy during bilateral lower limb movement

“…This approach achieved the effect of eliminating weakly correlated or uncorrelated connections in the network. 34 This sparsification method ensured the comparability of network properties between two groups with the same connection. The clustering coefficient (CC), global efficiency (GE), local efficiency (LE), and transitivity were subsequently calculated using the NetworkX library in Python.…”

Applications of Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) Neuroimaging During Rehabilitation Following Stroke: A Review

“…This mode of stimulation has also been confirmed in electroencephalogram (EEG) studies [ 27 ]. Zhang et al [ 28 ] conducted a study to evaluate cortical activation during a right-hand shoulder-touch task in 22 stroke patients and 14 healthy controls. The results indicated that healthy controls had a lateralization index (LI) of 0.268, displaying left hemisphere dominance in activation.…”