Topic: muscle activity

A one-year machine-learning research internship with the Allen Institute Neural Dynamics accelerator. The intern will analyze recordings from two genetically distinct neural populations in the striatum alongside motor output, muscle activity and behavioral video. The project asks how shared and population-specific neural activity encodes movement, using latent-variable models, regression, classification and cross-validation. Work includes reproducible Python analysis and communicating results through figures and methods that may contribute to a poster or publication. No previous neuroscience b

My group pioneered the development of a novel intracortical brain computer interface (iBCI) that decodes muscle activity (EMG) from signals recorded in the motor cortex of animals. We use these synthetic EMG signals to control Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES), which causes the muscles to contract and thereby restores rudimentary voluntary control of the paralyzed limb. In the past few years, there has been much interest in the fact that information from the millions of neurons active during movement can be reduced to a small number of “latent” signals in a low-dimensional manifold compu

A central question in motor physiology has been whether motor cortex activity resembles muscle activity, and if not, why not? Over fifty years, extensive observations have failed to provide a concise answer, and the topic remains much debated. To provide a different perspective, we employed a novel behavioral paradigm that affords extensive comparison between time-evolving neural and muscle activity. Single motor-cortex neurons displayed many muscle-like properties, but the structure of population activity was not muscle-like. Unlike muscle activity, neural activity was structured to avoid ’tr

The upper limbs are essential for performing everyday tasks that require a wide range of motion and precise coordination. Planning and timing are crucial to achieve coordinated movement. Sensory information about the target and current body state is critical, as is the integration of prior experience represented by prelearned inverse dynamics that generate the associated muscle activity. We propose a generative model that uses a recurrent neural network to predict upper limb muscle activity during various simple and complex everyday movements. By identifying movement primitives within the si