Lunardini Francesca, Casellato Claudia, Bertucco Matteo, Sanger Terence D, Pedrocchi Alessandra
Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, NearLab, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133, Milan, Italy.
Department of Biology, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA, 02115, USA.
Ann Biomed Eng. 2017 Aug;45(8):1949-1962. doi: 10.1007/s10439-017-1838-0. Epub 2017 May 30.
Childhood dystonia is a movement disorder characterized by muscle overflow and variability. This is the first study that investigates upper limb muscle synergies in childhood dystonia with the twofold aim of deepening the understanding of neuromotor dysfunctions and paving the way to possible synergy-based myocontrol interfaces suitable for this neurological population. Nonnegative matrix factorization was applied to the activity of upper-limb muscles recorded during the execution of writing tasks in children with dystonia and age-matched controls. Despite children with dystonia presented compromised kinematics of the writing outcome, a strikingly similarity emerged in the number and structure of the synergy vectors extracted from children in the two groups. The analysis also revealed that the timing of activation of the synergy coefficients did not significantly differ, while the amplitude of the peaks presented a slight reduction. These results suggest that the synergy analysis has the ability of capturing the uncorrupted part of the electromyographic signal in dystonia. Such an ability supports a possible future use of muscle synergies in the design of myocontrol interfaces for children with dystonia.
儿童肌张力障碍是一种以肌肉过度活动和变异性为特征的运动障碍。这是第一项研究儿童肌张力障碍上肢肌肉协同作用的研究,具有双重目的:加深对神经运动功能障碍的理解,并为适合这一神经疾病群体的基于协同作用的肌控接口铺平道路。非负矩阵分解应用于肌张力障碍儿童和年龄匹配的对照组在执行书写任务时记录的上肢肌肉活动。尽管肌张力障碍儿童的书写结果运动学受损,但从两组儿童中提取的协同向量的数量和结构却出现了惊人的相似性。分析还表明,协同系数的激活时间没有显著差异,而峰值幅度略有降低。这些结果表明,协同分析有能力捕捉肌张力障碍中肌电信号未受损的部分。这种能力支持未来在为肌张力障碍儿童设计肌控接口时可能会使用肌肉协同作用。