Clinical trials

The acute phase of stroke is characterized by an enhancement of neural plasticity which supports rapid motor recovery. It is unclear whether acute stroke patients can acquire new motor skills with their affected upper limb. The aims of this research program are: 1. To test the capacity of acute stroke patients (\< 21 days) to learn and retain a complex unimanual motor skill. 2. To explore whether acute stroke to different brain regions (quantified with brain MRI) induces specific deficits in motor skill learning. 3. To compare acute stroke patients with healthy individuals and with chronic stroke patients.

To test the capacity of healthy and chronic stroke patients to learn and retain a complex bimanual motor skill, trained on the neurorehabilitation robot REAplan (R) (bimanual version).

The subacute phase of stroke provides a window into how a lesion perturbs sensorimotor functions prior to reorganisation driven by plasticity and neurorehabilitation. The recovery from motor impairment has been extensively studied, but it is currently unknown whether motor skill learning (MSkL) is enhanced or impaired during acute stroke, especially bimanual motor skill learning (bim-MSkL), which likely requires more motor-attentional-cognitive resources than unimanual MSkL. The goals of this project are: to determine the neural substrates critical to achieve proximal and distal bimanual motor skill learning (bim-MSkL) by specifying whether (sub)acute stroke to different brain areas (cortical and subcortical) induce specific deficits in bimanual and/or distal bim-MSkL, which behavioral components are involved in bim-MSkL, and whether damage to the motor, sensory and inter-hemispheric pathways specifically impairs proximal and/or distal bim-MSkL.

This prospective study combining non conventional MRI techniques, neuropsychological screening tools, and a neurophysiological work-up using a sensitive and validated battery, will evaluate the predictive value of these measures and will explore the changes of the cognitive scores from baseline.