Overlap in the cortical representation of hand and forearm muscles as assessed by navigated TMS

Fang Jin, Sjoerd M. Bruijn, Andreas Daffertshofer*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

The representation of upper limb muscles in the motor cortex is not clear-cut. The motor cortex contains areas that, when stimulated, may activate different muscles simultaneously, hence they seem to overlap. We expected the cortical representations of synergistic muscle pairs to overlap more than those of non-synergistic muscles. To test this, we used navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation to probe eight hand and forearm muscles of twenty healthy participants. We transformed the cortical representations of muscles to a template MRI to allow for group analysis. We found that the amount of overlap in cortical representations differed significantly between within-hand and within-forearm muscle combinations. Most synergistic muscle pairs, both within the hand, within the forearm and between them, had a larger overlap than non-synergistic muscle pairs. Our study demonstrates the largely overlapping nature of cortical representations of upper limb muscles. It is noteworthy that the overlap is elevated in muscles that usually act in a synergistic manner.

Original languageEnglish
Article number100183
Pages (from-to)1-8
Number of pages8
JournalNeuroImage: Reports
Volume3
Issue number3
Early online date5 Sept 2023
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Sept 2023

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
FJ would like to thank the Chinese Scholarship Council for financial support (CSC # 201706210060). SMB was funded by a VIDI grant (no. 016.Vidi.178.014) from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Funding Information:
FJ would like to thank the Chinese Scholarship Council for financial support (CSC # 201706210060 ). SMB was funded by a VIDI grant (no. 016.Vidi.178.014 ) from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) .

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors

Keywords

  • Cortical overlap
  • Motor mapping
  • Muscle synergies
  • Neuro-navigation
  • TMS

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