Poster 2: Joint and Clinical Studies

Kristin Schmidt, Tamara Wright, Andria J. Farrens, Henry Wright, Susanne M. Morton, Fabrizio Sergi

University of Delaware

As stroke is a disease with high inter-subject variability, there is growing interest to establish individualized predictive biomarkers of motor recovery. Recent work shows that changes in functional connectivity between brain networks measured immediately before and after exposure to a motor task reflect the motor memory consolidation process and may predict responsiveness to training programs based on a similar paradigm. To investigate the relationship between changes in resting state functional connectivity (rsFC) and motor recovery, we acquired resting state fMRI scans in fourteen post-stroke individuals immediately before and after performing an upper extremity motor task and compared changes in rsFC to motor performance evaluated via Upper Extremity Fugl-Meyer (UE-FM) before and after four weeks of physical therapy training. We found that a linear regression model based on the connectivity between the contralateral sensory cortex (S1) and the contralateral premotor cortex (PM) explained 66% of the variance in motor recovery. These results suggest that relevant task-induced changes in functional connectivity may serve as a predictive assessment of an individual’s responsiveness to training.

Research Area: Neuromuscular Modeling & Control