Rehabilitation of motor function after stroke: A bibliometric analysis of global research from 2004 to 2022

The aim of this guideline is to provide a synopsis of best clinical practices in the rehabilitative care of adults recovering from stroke.

Chronic stroke patients with severe hand weakness respond poorly to rehabilitation efforts. Here, we evaluated efficacy of daily brain-machine interface (BMI) training to increase the hypothesized beneficial effects of physiotherapy alone in patients with severe paresis in a double-blind sham-controlled design proof of concept study. Thirty-two chronic stroke patients with severe hand weakness were randomly assigned to 2 matched groups and participated in 17.8 ± 1.4 days of training rewarding desynchronization of ipsilesional oscillatory sensorimotor rhythms with contingent online movements of hand and arm orthoses (experimental group, n = 16). In the control group (sham group, n = 16), movements of the orthoses occurred randomly. Both groups received identical behavioral physiotherapy immediately following BMI training or the control intervention. Upper limb motor function scores, electromyography from arm and hand muscles, placebo-expectancy effects, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) blood oxygenation level-dependent activity were assessed before and after intervention. A significant group × time interaction in upper limb (combined hand and modified arm) Fugl-Meyer assessment (cFMA) motor scores was found. cFMA scores improved more in the experimental than in the control group, presenting a significant improvement of cFMA scores (3.41 ± 0.563-point difference, p = 0.018) reflecting a clinically meaningful change from no activity to some in paretic muscles. cFMA improvements in the experimental group correlated with changes in fMRI laterality index and with paretic hand electromyography activity. Placebo-expectancy scores were comparable for both groups. The addition of BMI training to behaviorally oriented physiotherapy can be used to induce functional improvements in motor function in chronic stroke patients without residual finger movements and may open a new door in stroke neurorehabilitation. Copyright © 2013 American Neurological Association.

This article presents a description and case study of CiteSpace II, a Java application which supports visual exploration with knowledge discovery in bibliographic databases. Highly cited and pivotal documents, areas of specialization within a knowledge domain, and emergence of research topics are visually mapped through a progressive knowledge domain visualization approach to detecting and visualizing trends and patterns in scientific literature. The test case in this study is progressive knowledge domain visualization of the field of medical informatics. Datasets based on publications from twelve journals in the medical informatics field covering the time period from 1964-2004 were extracted from PubMed and Web of Science (WOS) and developed as testbeds for evaluation of the CiteSpace system. Two resulting document-term co-citation and MeSH term co-occurrence visualizations are qualitatively evaluated for identification of pivotal documents, areas of specialization, and research trends. Practical applications in bio-medical research settings are discussed.