Phase-Dependent Modulation of Muscle Activity and Intermuscular Coupling During Walking in Patients After Stroke

Many patients experience motor and sensory impairments after stroke, leading to gait disturbances. Analysis of muscle modulation mode during walking can provide evidence for neurological changes after stroke, while how stroke affects individual muscle activity and muscular coordination in certain gait sub-phases remains unclear. The purpose of the present study is to comprehensively investigate phase-dependent ankle muscle activity and intermuscular coupling patterns in post-stroke patients. In this experiment, 10 post-stroke patients, 10 young healthy subjects and 10 elderly healthy subjects were recruited. All subjects were asked to walk at their preferred speeds on the ground, and surface electromyography (sEMG) and marker trajectory data were collected simultaneously. The gait cycle of each subject was divided into four substages according to the labeled trajectory data. On this basis, fuzzy approximate entropy (fApEn) was used to analyze the complexity of ankle muscle activity during walking. And the transfer entropy (TE) was applied to reflect directed information transmission between ankle muscles. Results found that complexity of ankle muscles activities in patients after stroke showed similar trends to that in healthy subjects. Different from healthy subjects, the complexity of ankle muscle activity in patients with stroke tends to increase in most of the gait sub-phases. While TE values between the ankle muscles in patients with stroke tend to decrease throughout th...
Source: IEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering - Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research