Directed network analysis reveals changes in cortical and muscular connectivity caused by different standing balance tasks.

Standing balance forms the basis of daily activities that require the integration of multi-sensory information and coordination of multi-muscle activation. Previous studies have confirmed that the cortex is directly involved in balance control, but little is known about the neural mechanisms of cortical integration and muscle coordination in maintaining standing balance.We used a direct directed transfer function (dDTF) to analyze the changes in the cortex and muscle connections of healthy subjects (15 subjects: 13 male and 2 female) corresponding to different standing balance tasks.The results show that the topology of the EEG brain network and muscle network changes significantly as the difficulty of the balancing tasks increases. For muscle networks, the connection analysis shows that the connection of antagonistic muscle pairs plays a major role in the task. For EEG brain networks, graph theory-based analysis shows that the clustering coefficient increases significantly, and the characteristic path length decreases significantly with increasing task difficulty. We also found that cortex-to-muscle connections increased with the difficulty of the task and were significantly stronger than the muscle-to-cortex connections.These results show that changes in the difficulty of balancing tasks alter EEG brain networks and muscle networks, and an analysis based on the directed network can provide rich information for exploring the neural mechanisms of balance control.