Adjacent regenerative peripheral nerve interfaces produce phase-antagonist signals during voluntary walking in rats.
Daniel Ursu, Andrej Nedic, Melanie Urbanchek and 2 others
PMID 28438166WHAT IT FOUND
In four rats, adjacent regenerative peripheral nerve interfaces produced alternating signals during walking.
Signals matched intact muscles except the peroneal nerve signal during stance.
Key findings
01Adjacent regenerative peripheral nerve interfaces produced alternating myoelectric signals during continuous walking.
02Within groups, tibial and peroneal nerve signals differed significantly across stance and swing.
03Compared with controls, graft signals were equivalent for tibial stance, tibial swing, and peroneal swing, but not for peroneal stance.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
Four rats only. The study was exploratory and conducted in animals, not humans or amputees. The peroneal nerve stance comparison did not meet equivalence, and the paper notes it would meet the criterion if seven low control strides were treated as outliers. The graft signals were not mirror images of controls, which may reflect selective or partial reinnervation.
Declared interests
The paper states that Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded the work. No author conflict disclosures are provided.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that regenerative peripheral nerve interfaces are ready for human prosthetic control. This was an exploratory study in four rats, and the peroneal nerve stance comparison did not meet the equivalence criterion.