Both motor imagery and mirror training have been used in motor rehabilitation settings to promote skill learning and plasticity. As motor imagery and mirror training are suggested to be closely linked, it was hypothesized that mirror training augmented by motor imagery would increase corticospinal excitability (CSE) significantly compared to mirror training alone. Forty-four participants were split over two experimental groups. Each participant visited the laboratory once to receive either mirror training alone or mirror training augmented with layered stimulus response training (LSRT), a type of motor imagery training. Participants performed 16 min of mirror training, making repetitive grasping movements paced by a metronome. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) mapping was performed before and after the mirror training to test for changes in CSE of the untrained hand. Self-reports suggested that the imagery training was effective in helping the participant to perform the mirror training task as instructed. Nonetheless, neither training type resulted in a significant change of TMS map area, nor was there an interaction between the groups. The results from the study revealed no effect of a single session of 16 min of either mirror training or mirror training enhanced by imagery on TMS map area. Despite the negative result of the present experiment, this does not suggest that either motor imagery or mirror training might be ineffective as a rehabilitation therapy. Further study is required to allow disentangling the role of imagery and action observation in mirror training so that mirror training can be further tailored to the individual according to their abilities.@en

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) is a widespread technique to study corticospinal excitability. Its use in longitudinal studies is crucial to analyze the plasticity induced by rehabilitation treatments on neuromotor-impaired subjects. As TMS-related measures fluctuate with time and attention, it is crucial to collect them rapidly. Recently, it has been shown that stimulus-response (SR) curves can be acquired in less than two minutes (Mathias et al.). This technique favors the clinical use of TMS-related measures, but its intersession reliability has not been investigated yet. In this study we propose a test-retest reliability analysis of five parameters extracted from SR curves acquired on the preactivated Tibialis Anterior (TA) using the fast acquisition method. A secondary aim was to compare the reliability of these parameters for two different calculation methods of the Motor Evoked Potential (MEP) amplitude: the peak-to-peak value, referred as MEPpp, and the root mean square value, referred as MEParea. The intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC), the standard error of measurement (SEM) and the minimum detectable changes (MDC) were evaluated. Thirteen neurologically-intact elders (age 62.2±5.1) were recruited. The acquisition protocol was set up to minimize the variability of the measurement between the two sessions, carried out on separate days: an optical tracking system was used to maintain the coil placement, the EMG data were normalized over the maximum peripherally evoked action potential and a visual feedback was displayed to the testing subject to maintain the TA activation level. All the parameters, regardless the method used to compute the MEP amplitude , showed good to excellent reliability (0.75

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