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Pattern Reorganization of Corticomuscular Connection with the Tactile Stimulation

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Abstract

Sensitivity to tactile stimuli is an indispensable feedback in human motion control. However, previous studies on tactile stimulation mainly focused on the effects of superficial tactile stimulation on the motor cortex, but the role of deep tactile feedback stimulation in motor tasks is not clear. Corticomuscular coherence (CMC) is an effective method for studying dynamic motion tasks. Recent evidence suggests that CMC is enhanced by tactile stimulation in the beta-band. But, the mechanism of tactile stimulation in dynamic motor tasks is still undetermined. In order to explore the role of tactile stimulation in dynamic motion tasks, we examined the correlation between EEG/EMG in a motor task with tactile stimulus input, including the corticomuscular coherence and the causal connections (convergent cross mapping, CCM). In this study, seventeen subjects were recruited to complete stimuli and non-stimuli motor tasks. After the experiment, the time–frequency analysis of CMC showed that the somatosensory association cortex was clearly involved in the dynamic motor tasks. During the contraction of hand muscles, the activity of CMC was concentrated in gamma band, while in the maintenance process, it was concentrated in beta-band. After eliminating the distractors of attention, we did not find a similar result as previous studies had found—tactile stimuli lead to increased CMC activity in gamma band. On the contrary, CCM causality analysis showed that tactile stimulation could significantly enhance the connection between the cerebral cortex and a muscle. We speculate that tactile stimulation can enhance the corticomuscular causal relationship, and that the effect of tactile stimulation on corticomuscular coherence may have more complex mechanisms. This study provides new insights into neural mechanism of tactile feedback and provides more information about the causality of brain networks in tactile feedback task.

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Acknowledgments

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The study was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61431012), National Key Research and Development Program of China (Nos. 2017YFB1300303, 2018YFC2002601), Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province (Grant No. 2018JM7080), China Postdoc-toral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2018M643672), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. xjh01219049), and 2019 Ministry of Education in China (MOE) Youth Foundation Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (Grant No. 19YJC740119).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Ethics Committee of Xi’an Jiaotong University and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Xi’an Jiaotong University, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, School of Life Science and Technology, The Key Laboratory of Biomedical Information Engineering of Ministry of Education, The Key Laboratory of Neuro-informatics & Rehabilitation Engineering of Ministry of Civil Affairs, Xi’an, 710049, People’s Republic of China

    Long Li, Jing Guo, Hongjian Wu, Lina Li, Tian Liu & Jue Wang

  2. Institute of Health and Rehabilitation Science, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, School of Life Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, People’s Republic of China

    Long Li, Jing Guo, Hongjian Wu, Lina Li, Tian Liu & Jue Wang

  3. National Engineering Research Center of Health Care and Medical Devices, Xi’an, People’s Republic of China

    Long Li, Jing Guo, Hongjian Wu, Lina Li, Tian Liu & Jue Wang

  4. Xi’an International Studies University, Xi’an, 710128, People’s Republic of China

    Yanlong Zhang

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  1. Long Li
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  2. Jing Guo
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Correspondence to Tian Liu or Jue Wang.

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Associate Editor Xiaoxiang Zheng oversaw the review of this article.

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Li, L., Guo, J., Zhang, Y. et al. Pattern Reorganization of Corticomuscular Connection with the Tactile Stimulation. Ann Biomed Eng 48, 834–847 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-019-02421-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-019-02421-y

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