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Category: Project

Description: In this study, we propose to evaluate the potential of a network approach to electromyography and electroencephalography recordings to detect covert command-following in healthy participants. The motivation underlying this study is the development of a diagnostic tool that can be applied in common clinical settings to detect awareness in patients that are unable to convey explicit motor or verbal responses, such as patients that suffer from disorders of consciousness (DoC). The proposed study will examine the brain and muscle response during movement and imagined movement of simple motor tasks, as well as during resting state. Brain-muscle networks will be obtained using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) of the coherence spectra for all the channel pairs. We will contrast the configuration of the networks during imagined movement and resting state at the group level, and subject-level classifiers will be implemented using as features the weights of the NMF together with trial-wise power modulations and heart response to classify resting state from motor imagery. The results of this investigation will determine the feasibility of applying this paradigm to individual patients.