Context

This experiment examines the brain correlates of facial muscle contractions in patients with hemifacial palsy. The onset of facial movements is measured with electromyograms (EMG). Activity during motor preparation is localized at the cortical level. The topographic spatial organisation of the premotor activity is compared between patients and healthy controls.

Technology

Patients and healthy controls are equipped with facial EMG and their brain activity is recorded with MEG while they perform systematic motor tasks.

Pipeline

After noise cancellation (maxfilter) of the MEG signal, the onset of each movement is marked manually by the experimenter, the data is then processed with a focus on activity just prior to these onsets. Source localization is performed using a weighted minimum norm estimate (wMNE). Premotor activity peaks are marked manually, and their position is used as a dependent variable for statistical analysis. A mixed within- between-groups experimental design is used.

There are two processing branches at the beginning:

• processing of the resting-state data, used to create the noise covariance matrix used for source reconstruction
• processing of task data,

Preprocessing: resting-state data

Preprocessing: task data

Source estimation

Measures

Statistics

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