Background: Hemiplegia is a common dysfunction caused by a stroke and leads to movement disability. Although the movement-related oscillation, the lateralization of the movement-related potential, and the event-related desynchronization have been investigated, the dynamic network modalities related to the movements in post-stroke hemiplegic patients are still left unveiled.
Methods: In our present study, we designed the motor execution task of the wrist extension, collected the movement-related electroencephalograms, and adopted the adaptive directed transfer function to investigate the dynamic motor networks in post-stroke hemiplegic patients. The corresponding time-varying networks of the wrist extension in post-stroke hemiplegic patients were constructed and then statistically explored.
Results: The results demonstrated that the effective connectivity between the stroked motor area and other areas decreased. In contrast, connectivity between non-stroked motor area and other areas was enhanced, especially the frontal and parietal-occipital lobes, to compensate for the dysfunction of the motor behaviors of the stroked patients.
Conclusions: These findings help us better understand the time-varying networks underlying the implementation of the motor behaviors of the patients with post-stroke hemiplegia and might provide a reliable biomarker to predict their future rehabilitation.