The System for Measuring Gait Parameters and Rehabilitation of Spinal Rats

Spinal cord injury results in serious neurophysiological consequences that alter healthy body functions and devastate the quality of life. One of them is the loss of sensorimotor functions, including disturbance or complete loss of locomotion. Recovery of locomotor function is one of the primary goals of therapeutic interventions in the case of an animal model. Choosing the right treatment strategy is crucial to the rehabilitation process, which is usually assessed by using quantitative methods. That is why it is important to have the technical means to quantify pertinent locomotion changes in experimental animals. The most useful quantitative methods can be divided into a few groups, such as electromyography, kinematics, and kinetics methods. Yet, despite the fact that each of the methods gives reliable data, it seems that only the combination of results taken from different methods gives a holistic view of the realistic level of restoring the locomotion. However, it is difficult to apply all the mentioned methods at the same time during each single examination. The presented article describes the application of the specialized system to the measurement of important locomotion parameters taken from different methods for the cases of spinal cord injury rats. Data were collected during each examination run. The study was carried out on spinal cord injury rats with controlled injury to the spinal cords of the lumbar section. Due to paraplegia, also a body weight support system was applied. Locomotion on the treadmill was induced by stimulation of the central pattern generator.