Fig. 9

Comparison of different therapies under global and local plasticity conditions for acute stroke model with a lesion size of A 5, B 10, C 15 and D 20 nodes. Lesion is introduced in the penultimate layer of the network consisting of 30 nodes. [Key for x-axis: 10S (CIMT Stereotypic), 11S (BMT Stereotypic), 10E (CIMT Exploratory), 11E (BMT Exploratory)]. For both hand movement conditions, exploratory therapy works better than the corresponding stereotypic therapy across all lesion sizes (p < 0.05 upon comparing mean RE for network after therapy with 11S vs 11E and 10S vs 10E, and p > 0.1 when comparing therapies within E therapy i.e., 10E vs 11E and within S therapy i.e., 10S vs 11S). Upon comparing the performance based on plasticity condition, we can see that no significant changes are observed when the size of the lesion is small (p > 0.1 (n.s.) for therapy 11E under local vs global plasticity condition and for therapy 10E under local vs global plasticity condition. S therapies were not compared for plasticity condition since we see the E therapy is better than S). However, for larger lesions, global plasticity condition is better (p < 0.05 for lesion size = 20 nodes (Fig. 8D) for therapy 11E under local vs global plasticity condition and for therapy 10E under local vs global plasticity condition). With higher lesion size, the resulting damage is also higher. Hence the network requires more connections in order to recover