Kinesiology Professor Develops Tool to Study Brain-Muscle Coordination

Osmar Pinto Neto, a professor of kinesiology at CSUSM, and his colleagues created a free, open-source computational tool that lets researchers simulate electrical muscle activity and examine how different patterns of neural input may affect coordination between the two hands.

The study, which was published in “Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine,” employs computational modeling in order to look at how cortical and subcortical influences might be reflected in electromyography (EMG) and in the synchronization seen between muscles.

Rather than using muscle signals to directly infer what is happening in the brain, the simulator lets researchers test specific hypotheses in a controlled setting. They can alter their assumptions about neural input and bilateral interaction and then see how these changes affect the simulated EMG signals. Because both the article and the simulator are openly available, other researchers can replicate and extend the framework. Pinto Neto believes there are potential applications in future research into motor control and in the development of biomarkers for neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injury and stroke.

Pinto Neto's paper is titled “A computational framework for EMG simulation and coherence-based biomarker analysis on neural crosstalk in bimanual coordination.” The free open-source simulator is also available online.

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