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Title: Similarity of Hand Muscle Synergies Elicited by Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and Those Found During Voluntary Movement
Converging evidence in human and animal models suggests that exogenous stimulation of the motor cortex (M1) elicits responses in the hand with similar modular structure to that found during voluntary grasping movements. The aim of this study was to establish the extent to which modularity in muscle responses to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to M1 resembles modularity in muscle activation during voluntary hand movements involving finger fractionation. EMG was recorded from eight hand-forearm muscles in nine healthy individuals. Modularity was defined using non-negative matrix factorization to identify low rank approximations (spatial muscle synergies) of the complex activation patterns of EMG data recorded during high density TMS mapping of M1 and voluntary formation of gestures in the American Sign Language alphabet. Analysis of synergies as a set, and individually, revealed greater than chance similarity between those derived from TMS and those derived from voluntary movement. Both datasets included synergies dominated by single intrinsic hand muscles presumably to meet the demand for highly fractionated finger movement. These results suggest a cortical role in combining corticospinal connectivity to individual intrinsic hand muscles with modular mulit-muscle activation via synergies.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1935337 1804550
NSF-PAR ID:
10357668
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Journal of Neurophysiology
ISSN:
0022-3077
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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