Effects of task performance on brain activity during a bilateral leg press task: An fMRI study
Poster No:
2066
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
HoWon Kim1, Taylor Zuleger2, Shayla Warren2, Manish Anand2, Alexis Slutsky-Ganesh2, Jed Diekfuss2, Bryan Schlink3, Justin Rush1, Janet Simon1, Gregory Myer2, Dustin Grooms4
Institutions:
1Ohio University, Athens, OH, 2Emory Sports Performance And Research Center (SPARC), Flowery Branch, GA, 3Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, OH, 4Ohio University, Athens, OH, Athens, OH
First Author:
Co-Author(s):
Alexis Slutsky-Ganesh, PhD, ACSM-CEP
Emory Sports Performance And Research Center (SPARC)
Flowery Branch, GA
Emory Sports Performance And Research Center (SPARC)
Flowery Branch, GA
Gregory Myer, PhD, FACSM, CSCS*D
Emory Sports Performance And Research Center (SPARC)
Flowery Branch, GA
Emory Sports Performance And Research Center (SPARC)
Flowery Branch, GA
Introduction:
Recent advances in neuroimaging methods have helped to characterize brain activity associated with multi-joint lower extremity motor control. (Mehta et al., 2009; Jaeger et al., 2014; Noble, Eng and Boyd, 2014; Fontes et al., 2015) However, limited work has concurrently captured joint kinematics to determine how natural movement variability is associated with brain activity. (Anand et al., 2021; Slutsky-Ganesh et al., 2023) Thus, the purpose of this study was to isolate the neural correlates of lower extremity task performance using concurrent measures of brain activity and knee joint kinematics during a resisted bilateral leg press task.
Methods:
Sixty-six (15.7±1.5years, 164.1±7.1cm, 64.1±11.7kg) right-leg dominant adolescent female athletes participated in the current study. Structural and functional (fMRI) neuroimaging data was obtained using a 48-channel head coil on a 3T GE Signa Premier scanner. fMRI data was acquired during a leg press task. (Slutsky-Ganesh et al., 2023) The leg press task engaged bilateral hip, knee, and ankle movement against elastic resistance bands (~9.1kg) and was performed as a block design (Figure 1). Number of cycles, knee sagittal (flexion/extension), and frontal (adduction/abduction) range of motion (ROM) were used as measures of task performance. Leg press cycle was defined as the sine wave between two consecutive peak knee flexion angles. ROM (sagittal and frontal) was the difference between minimum and maximum knee joint angle within each cycle and was averaged across the entire cycles to calculate a mean ROM value for each plane. All fMRI data analyses underwent standardized preprocessing steps, which included brain extraction, motion correction, slice timing correction, intensity normalization, spatial smoothing, and non-linear registration to standard space (MNI-152 2mm brain). After preprocessing, an independent component analysis for automatic removal of motion artifacts (ICA-AROMA) was used to denoise and reduce motion-induced signal variations (Pruim et al., 2015), and a high pass filter at 100 s was applied to the data. Subject-level analyses were performed with individualized cerebrospinal fluid and white matter regressors to prioritize the activation in the gray matter. Three separate group-level mixed-effect analyses were completed to investigate brain activity that was positively and/or negatively associated with demeaned number of cycles, sagittal and frontal ROM. In the group-level analyses, a gray matter voxelwise covariate was used as a covariate of no interest to control for variations in gray matter across subjects. Number of cycles was added as a covariate of no interest to control cycle variation for ROM analyses. A priori cluster-corrected significance threshold of z=3.1 and an alpha level of p =.05 were applied to all analyses.
Results:
Greater mean knee sagittal ROM (26.4±11.7º) was positively associated with greater brain activity in the right lateral occipital cortex (z=4, p=.0004) (Figure 2). There were no significant relationships between brain activity and mean knee frontal ROM (3.3±2º) and number of cycles (73.5±5.1).
Conclusions:
The current study identified a distinct cortical representation for knee sagittal ROM in the right lateral occipital cortex, which might be due to increased afferent information resulting from increased knee ROM. (Edin and Abbs, 1991; Jami, 1992; Strong et al., 2023) Brain activity appears to be influenced by natural task performance of sagittal plane ROM and may be less sensitive to identify the relationships with frontal plane ROM and number of cycles during the resisted bilateral leg press task in adolescent female athletes. Future studies should 1) compare in-scanner and functional task joint kinematics, such as the drop vertical jump, to better understand how in-scanner movement represents out of scanner movement and 2) correlate out of scanner functional movement to brain activity during the leg press task.
Modeling and Analysis Methods:
Activation (eg. BOLD task-fMRI) 2
Motor Behavior:
Motor Planning and Execution 1
Motor Behavior Other
Novel Imaging Acquisition Methods:
BOLD fMRI
Keywords:
FUNCTIONAL MRI
Motor
Somatosensory
Other - Movement Variability and Brain activity
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
Provide references using author date format
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