FMRI Paradigm to Neurorehabilitation: Preliminary Experimentation

The neurological affections that cause incapability, such as Parkinson, Dementia, and Stroke, are each time bigger. For these pathologies, the therapies require comprehensive and coordinated treatment based on neurorehabilitation [19]. Nowadays, these therapies are addressed to enrich environments that include non-invasive techniques such as Virtual Reality, and Serious Games (SG) [15]. These new technologies look forward to generating neuroplasticity, therefore, it is of interest to count with quantitative methods that show the new reorganization and regeneration of neural connections. One way of quantifier neuroplasticity is with functional Magnetic Resonance Images (fMRI). Here the echo-planar image sequences (EPI) are used to measure the oxygenation changes. Thus, it was hypothesized that it is possible to measure the neuroplasticity in treatments of neurorehabilitation from functional and anatomical magnetic resonance. With the achievement of a protocol to evaluate the impact of the technology or rehabilitation based on SG in brain plasticity, it was proposed the comparison between fMRI software and the application of the complete protocol on a subject without any known pathology. Was worked with a patient with no known previous pathologies, who performed two functional MRI studies, pre-post application of the neurorehabilitation tool. With a difference of one month between the two studies. Each one was worked with movement imagination of the right, left, and random arm movements. The initial results are compared with the end results. The number and size of activation areas per slice are visualized, as well as the size and morphology of the activation volumes obtained.