Brain Connectivity Changes During Bimanual and Rotated Motor Imagery

Motor imagery-based brain-computer interface (MI-BCI) currently represents a new trend in rehabilitation. However, individual differences in the responsive frequency bands and a poor understanding of the communication between the ipsilesional motor areas and other regions limit the use of MI-BCI therapy.
Objective:
Bimanual training has recently attracted attention as it achieves better outcomes as compared to repetitive one-handed training. This study compared the effects of three MI tasks with different visual feedback.
Methods:
Fourteen healthy subjects performed single hand motor imagery tasks while watching single static hand (traditional MI), single hand with rotation movement (rmMI), and bimanual coordination with a hand pedal exerciser (bcMI). Functional connectivity is estimated by Transfer Entropy (TE) analysis for brain information flow.
Results:
Brain connectivity of conducting three MI tasks showed that the bcMI demonstrated increased communications from the parietal to the bilateral prefrontal areas and increased contralateral connections between motor-related zones and spatial processing regions.
Discussion/Conclusion:
The results revealed bimanual coordination operation events increased spatial information and motor planning under the motor imagery task. And the proposed bimanual coordination MI-BCI (bcMI-BCI) can also achieve the effect of traditional motor imagery tasks and promotes more effective connections with different brain regions to better integrate motor-cortex functions for aiding the development of more effective MI-BCI therapy.
Clinical and Translational Impact Statement
The proposed bcMI-BCI provides more effective connections with different brain areas and integrates motor-cortex functions to promote motor imagery rehabilitation for patients’ impairment.