Society For Neuroscience, November 2008

Program#/Poster#:

166.20/II30

Title:

Minimum acceleration criterion with constraints as a tool to detect the onset time and initial motor command of reaching movements

Location:

Washington Convention Center: Hall A-C

Presentation Start/End Time:

Sunday, Nov 16, 2008, 11:00 AM -12:00 PM

Authors:

*A. KARNIEL, L. BOTZER;
Biomed.
Engin, Ben-Gurion Univ. Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel

A reaching movement is an elementary motor task extensively studied and measured in numerous laboratories around the world, with important scientific and clinical applications. Since a fast reaching movement is typically considered a ballistic movement, namely produced in feedforward open loop control, at least at the initial stage of the movement, the key features of such a movement are its initiation time and the initial speed profile. In this study we propose a novel method to extract the movement onset time and the speed profile during the commencement of the movement.
The minimum acceleration criterion with constraints (MACC) was recently proposed as an underlying principle for optimal trajectories of arm reaching movements. [Ben-Itzhak and Karniel, Neural Computation, 20(3):779-812, 2008]. The MACC derived trajectory consists of three parts which initially starts with a constant jerk (third time derivative of position) .
Our method assumes that the arm is initially stationary and then moves with constant jerk towards the new position. Hence, our goal is to detect when the movement diverts from a constant position, and what the value of the constant jerk is. We used a 100mSec search window in which the piecewise polynomial model described above was fitted numerically. The minimal fitting error was used to detect the movement onset as well as the initial jerk. Verification of the method was performed using double blind tests on two independent expert observers as well as automatic segmentation of the proposed method as compared to conventional velocity threshold on simulated data of minimum jerk movements; simulated minimum jerk movements were chosen to eliminate bias towards our MACC based method. The simulated data was created with various durations and amplitudes and artificially added noise. We demonstrate the advantages of our method and show that the novel onset detection method is superior.Finally, we demonstrate the ability of this method to disentangle between feedforward and feedback adaptation during exposure to visoumotor delay as well as in a case study with children with cerebral palsy.
This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute for Psychobiology in Israel - Founded by The Charles E. Smith Family, and a grant from the Ministry of Science, Culture & Sport, Israel, and by the Ministry of Research, France

Support:

The National Institute for Psychobiology in Israel

[Poster, pdf]

 

[Matlab code]