Application of a neural interface for restoration of leg movements: Intra-spinal stimulation using the brain electrical activity in spinally injured rabbits

Abstract

This study aimed to design a neural interface that extracts movement commands from the brain to generate appropriate intra-spinal stimulation to restore leg movement. This study comprised four steps: (1) Recording electrocorticographic (ECoG) signals ancorresponding leg movements in different trials. (2) Partial laminectomy to induce spinal cord injury (SCI) and detect motor modulein the spinal cord. (3) Delivering appropriate intra-spinal stimulation to the motor modules for restoration of the movements to thosdocumented before SCI. (4) Development of a neural interface created by sparse linear regression (SLiR) model to detect movemencommands transmitted from the brain to the modules. Correlation coefficient (CC) and normalized root mean square (NRMS) errowas calculated to evaluate the neural interface effectiveness. It was found that by stimulating detected spinal cord modules, joint anglevaluated before SCI was not significantly different from that of post-SCI (P >0.05). Based on results of SLiR model, overall CC and NRMvalues were 0.63 ± 0.14 and 0.34 ± 0.16 (mean ± SD), respectively. These results indicated that ECoG data contained information abouintra-spinal stimulations and the developed neural interface could produce intra-spinal stimulation based on ECoG data, for restoratioof leg movements after SCI.