Motor Neuroprosthesis on Forelimb Function Recovery of Chronic Stroke Rats

The chronic upper limb motor dysfunction caused by ischemic stroke not only seriously affected the quality of patients' life but also increased the burden on society. Current physical training and transcranial neuromodulation performed not well enough on fine movement recovery. Motor neuroprosthesis emerging as a new rehabilitation technology has been proven to not only effectively improve fine upper and lower limbs' motor dysfunction caused by spinal cord injury or trauma but also affect neuroplasticity. However, this technology is still in its infancy in stroke rehabilitation. The obstacle to the application of motor neuroprosthesis in stroke rehabilitation is a proper neuroprosthetic system that can accurately decode motor-related intention or movement and deliver feedback stimulation quickly. In this work, we built a neuroprosthetic system based on motor intention decoding using local field potentials from the ipsilateral premotor cortex and simultaneously delivering epidural electrical stimulation over the ischemic area. Then we applied it to stroke rats with chronic forelimb dysfunction to verify the effect of rehabilitation. Single-pellet retrieval task was used for quantifying the forelimb fine movement. After comparing with continuous stimulation and only physical training treatment, our results primarily proved that motor neuroprosthesis can effectively improve the forelimb function of stroke, which provided a potential for clinical application.