Key Laboratory of Digital Medical Engineering of Hebei Province, Hebei University, Baoding 071002, People's Republic of China.
Institute of Electric Engineering, Yanshan University, Qinhuangdao, Hebei 066004, People's Republic of China.
J Neural Eng. 2022 Jul 26;19(4). doi: 10.1088/1741-2552/ac7d0c.
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.
站立平衡是日常活动的基础，需要整合多感觉信息和协调多肌肉激活。先前的研究已经证实，大脑皮层直接参与平衡控制，但对于皮层整合和肌肉协调在维持站立平衡中的神经机制知之甚少。我们使用直接定向传递函数（dDTF）分析了对应于不同站立平衡任务的健康受试者（15 名受试者：13 名男性和 2 名女性）的皮层和肌肉连接的变化。结果表明，随着平衡任务难度的增加，脑电图脑网络和肌肉网络的拓扑结构发生显著变化。对于肌肉网络，连接分析表明，拮抗肌对的连接在任务中起主要作用。对于脑电图脑网络，基于图论的分析表明，聚类系数显著增加，特征路径长度随任务难度的增加而显著减小。我们还发现，随着任务难度的增加，皮层到肌肉的连接增加，并且明显强于肌肉到皮层的连接。这些结果表明，平衡任务难度的变化改变了脑电图脑网络和肌肉网络，基于有向网络的分析可以为探索平衡控制的神经机制提供丰富的信息。
