Information Transfer Index-A Promising Measure of the Corticomusclar Interaction

It is generally believed that a major cause of motor dysfunction is the impairment in neural network that controls movement. But little is known about the underlying mechanisms of the impairment in cortical control or in the neural connections between cortex and muscle that lead to the loss of motor ability. So understanding the functional connection between motor cortex and effector muscle is of utmost importance. Previous study mostly relied on cross-correlation, coherence functions or model based approaches such as Granger causality or dynamic causal modeling. In this work the information transfer index (ITI) was introduced to describe the information flows between motor cortex and muscle. Based on the information entropy the ITI can detect both linear and nonlinear interaction between two signals and thus represent a very comprehensive way to define the causality strength. The applicability of ITI is investigated based on simulations and electroencephalogram (EEG), surface electromyography (sEMG) recordings in a simple motor task.