Date / Location: Tuesday, 12 July 2022 / S06-531
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Aims: This work aims to develop a non-invasive technique to record the electrical activity of the spinal cord by means of active surface electrodes. Methods: 64 active electrodes are placed on the skin of the back in 6 columns parallel to the sagittal midline, covering from the cervical (C2) to the thoracic (T8) spinal segments. Interelectrode distance is ~3 cm across both rows and columns. Healthy volunteers participated in 3 different experiments: (1) a passive, fixed rate transcutaneous electrical stimulation of the median nerve; (2) two discrimination tasks, entailing either (a) passive texture stimulation or (b) active object manipulation; (3) finger tapping of different motor sequences at different levels of complexity. A number of post-processing and artifact correction techniques (referencing, ICA, adaptive filtering, and Canonical Correlation Analysis) were employed. Results: Preliminary results confirmed the possibility of obtaining artifact-free evoked electrical potentials reflecting the electrical activity of the cord following the different types of tasks employed. Importantly, these results are obtained without aggressive preprocessing and extensive computational resources. Conclusions: A specific electrode montage combined with the preprocessing and analysis pipeline developed for this project might contribute to the development of a non-invasive technology that allows recording the electrical activity of the spinal cord. Such a technique would have important implications in basic and clinical investigations, as well as in the development of novel BCI applications.