Journal of neuroscience methods
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J. Neurosci. Methods · May 2015
Evaluation of optimal electrode configurations for epidural spinal cord stimulation in cervical spinal cord injured rats.
Epidural spinal cord stimulation is a promising technique for modulating the level of excitability and reactivation of dormant spinal neuronal circuits after spinal cord injury (SCI). We examined the ability of chronically implanted epidural stimulation electrodes within the cervical spinal cord to (1) directly elicit spinal motor evoked potentials (sMEPs) in forelimb muscles and (2) determine whether these sMEPs can serve as a biomarker of forelimb motor function after SCI. ⋯ Results suggest that sMEPs from forelimb muscles can be useful biomarkers for identifying optimal parameters for epidural stimulation of the cervical spinal cord after SCI.
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J. Neurosci. Methods · May 2015
A novel device for studying weight supported, quadrupedal overground locomotion in spinal cord injured rats.
Providing weight support facilitates locomotion in spinal cord injured animals. To control weight support, robotic systems have been developed for treadmill stepping and more recently for overground walking. ⋯ These findings suggest that the BART device is a useful tool for assessing quadrupedal, overground locomotion which is a more natural form of locomotion relative to treadmill locomotion.
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J. Neurosci. Methods · Feb 2015
Assessment of attention threshold in rats by titration of visual cue duration during the five choice serial reaction time task.
The 5 choice serial reaction time task (5CSRTT) is commonly used to assess attention in rodents. We sought to develop a variant of the 5CSRTT that would speed training to objective success criteria, and to test whether this variant could determine attention capability in each subject. ⋯ The titration 5CSRTT method is an efficient training procedure for assessing attention and can be utilized to assess the limit in performance ability across subjects and various schedule manipulations.
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J. Neurosci. Methods · Jan 2015
On the use of information theory for the analysis of synchronous nociceptive withdrawal reflexes and somatosensory evoked potentials elicited by graded electrical stimulation.
To date, few studies have combined the simultaneous acquisition of nociceptive withdrawal reflexes (NWR) and somatosensory evoked potentials (SEPs). In fact, it is unknown whether the combination of these two signals acquired simultaneously could provide additional information on somatosensory processing at spinal and supraspinal level compared to individual NWR and SEP signals. ⋯ The current study introduces a novel approach that allows the quantification of the individual and joint information content of single-trial NWR and SEP features. This methodology could be used to decode and interpret spinal and supraspinal interaction in studies modulating the responsiveness of the nociceptive system.
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J. Neurosci. Methods · Jan 2015
Extra tree forests for sub-acute ischemic stroke lesion segmentation in MR sequences.
To analyse the relationship between structure and (dys-)function of the brain after stroke, accurate and repeatable segmentation of the lesion area in magnetic resonance (MR) images is required. Manual delineation, the current gold standard, is time consuming and suffers from high intra- and inter-observer differences. ⋯ The approach proves especially suitable to differentiate between new stroke and other white matter lesions based on the FLAIR sequence alone. This, and the high overlap, renders it suitable for automatic screening of large databases of MR scans, e.g. for a subsequent neuropsychological investigation. Finally, each feature's importance is assessed in detail and the approach's statistical dependency on clinical and image characteristics is investigated.