Effect of two different treadmill training protocols on locomotion recovery in spinalized rats

Both treadmill training and epidural stimulation can help to reactivate the central pattern generator (CPG) in the spinal cord after a spinal cord injury. However, designing an appropriate training approach and a stimulation profile is still a controversial issue. Bearing the Hebbian theory in mind, one can speculate a relation between the number of input afferent signals and the quality of movement recovery. In this paper, this conjecture was confirmed through some simulation studies on a model of CPGs in which the influence of increasing the afferent input weight on activating the CPG model was verified. Moreover, the performance of two different types of treadmill training along with epidural stimulation was assessed. The experimental results coincide with the achieved simulation results elucidating the effect of increasing the afferent input weights, means increasing the number of involved spinal sensory feedback during the training, on expedition of spinal CPG reactivation.