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Rehabilitation of motor function in children with cerebral palsy based on motor imagery

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Abstract

To promote the rehabilitation of motor function in children with cerebral palsy (CP), we developed motor imagery (MI) based training system to assist their motor rehabilitation. Eighteen CP children, ten in short- and eight in long-term rehabilitation, participated in our study. In short-term rehabilitation, every 2 days, the MI datasets were collected; whereas the duration of two adjacency MI experiments was ten days in the long-term protocol. Meanwhile, within two adjacency experiments, CP children were requested to daily rehabilitate the motor function based on our system for 30 min. In both strategies, the promoted motor information processing was observed. In terms of the relative signal power spectra, a main effect of time was revealed, as the promoted power spectra were found for the last time of MI recording, compared to that of the first one, which first validated the effectiveness of our intervention. Moreover, as for network efficiency related to the motor information processing, compared to the first MI, the increased network properties were found for the last MI, especially in long-term rehabilitation in which CP children experienced a more obvious efficiency promotion. These findings did validate that our MI-based rehabilitation system has the potential for CP children to assist their motor rehabilitation.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Key Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province, China (#2018B030339001), in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (#81330032, #81771925, #61961160705, #U19A2082, and #61901077), in part by the National Key Research and Development Plan of China (#2017YFB1002501).

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Author notes

  1. Jiaxin Xie, Lin Jiang, Yanan Li are contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Life Science and Technology, Center for Information in Medicine, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 611731, China

    Jiaxin Xie, Lin Jiang, Yanan Li, Baodan Chen, Fali Li, Yuanling Jiang, Dongrui Gao, Lili Deng, XuLin Lv, Dezhong Yao & Peng Xu

  2. The Clinical Hospital of Chengdu Brain Science Institute, MOE Key Lab for Neuroinformation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 611731, China

    Fali Li, Dezhong Yao & Peng Xu

  3. School of Computer Science, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu, 611731, China

    Dongrui Gao

  4. Sichuan Rehabilitation Hospital, Chengdu, China

    XianKun Ma

  5. School of Medicine, Sichuan Cancer Hospital, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

    Gang Yin

  6. Radiation Oncology Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province, Chengdu, China

    Gang Yin

  7. No. 2006, Xiyuan Ave, West Hi-Tech Zone, Chengdu, 611731, Sichuan, China

    Gang Yin, Dezhong Yao & Peng Xu

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  1. Jiaxin Xie
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Correspondence to Gang Yin, Dezhong Yao or Peng Xu.

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Xie, J., Jiang, L., Li, Y. et al. Rehabilitation of motor function in children with cerebral palsy based on motor imagery. Cogn Neurodyn 15, 939–948 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-021-09672-3

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