Publications de Nawal Noëlle Kinany

Towards personalized mapping through lumbosacral spinal cord task fMRI

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Nawal Noëlle Kinany, Ilaria Ricchi

The lumbosacral spinal cord contains neural circuits crucial for locomotion, organized into rostrocaudal levels with distinct somatosensory and motor neuron pools that project to and from the muscles of the lower limbs. However, the specific spinal levels ...

2025

Body size and intracranial volume interact with the structure of the central nervous system: A multi-center in vivo neuroimaging study

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Nawal Noëlle Kinany

Clinical research emphasizes the implementation of rigorous and reproducible study designs that rely on between-group matching or controlling for sources of biological variation such as subject’s sex and age. However, corrections for body size (i.e., heigh ...

MIT Press2025

Cerebro-spinal somatotopic organization uncovered through functional connectivity mapping

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Nawal Noëlle Kinany

Somatotopy, the topographical arrangement of sensorimotor pathways corresponding to distinct body parts, is a fundamental feature of the human central nervous system (CNS). Traditionally, investigations into brain and spinal cord somatotopy have been condu ...

2024

Characterization of the resting-state functional dynamics in the lumbosacral spinal cord

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Nawal Noëlle Kinany, Ilaria Ricchi

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in investigating spontaneous brain activity, with a newfound focus on understanding the resting state activity of the spinal cord due to its importance in sensorimotor interactions. Previous studies have p ...

European Signal Processing Conference, EUSIPCO2024

In vivo parcellation of the human spinal cord functional architecture

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Nawal Noëlle Kinany

The spinal cord is a critical component of the central nervous system, transmitting and integrating signals between the brain and the periphery via topographically organized functional levels. Despite its central role in sensorimotor processes and several ...

2024

Lumbosacral spinal cord functional connectivity at rest: From feasibility to reliability

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Nawal Noëlle Kinany, Ilaria Ricchi

In the past decade, exploration of spontaneous blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal fluctuations has expanded beyond the brain to include the spinal cord. While most studies have predominantly focused on the cervical region, the lumbosacral segments ...

2024

Decoding cerebro-spinal signatures of human behavior: Application to motor sequence learning

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Nawal Noëlle Kinany

Mapping the neural patterns that drive human behavior is a key challenge in neuroscience. Even the simplest of our everyday actions stem from the dynamic and complex interplay of multiple neural structures across the central nervous system (CNS). Yet, most ...

ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE2023

Towards reliable spinal cord fMRI: Assessment of common imaging protocols

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Nawal Noëlle Kinany, Silvestro Micera

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has revolutionized the investigation of brain function. Similar approaches can be translated to probe spinal mechanisms. However, imaging the spinal cord remains challenging, notably due to its size and location ...

ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE2022

Post-stroke reorganization of transient brain activity characterizes deficits and of functions

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Nawal Noëlle Kinany, Elvira Pirondini

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been widely employed to study stroke pathophysiology. In particular, analyses of fMRI signals at rest were directed at quantifying the impact of stroke on spatial features of brain networks. However, brain n ...

ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE2022

Spinal Cord fMRI: A New Window into the Central Nervous System

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Nawal Noëlle Kinany, Silvestro Micera

With the brain, the spinal cord forms the central nervous system. Initially considered a passive relay between the brain and the periphery, the spinal cord is now recognized as being active and plastic. Yet, it remains largely overlooked by the human neuro ...

SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC2022

Activity-dependent spinal cord neuromodulation rapidly restores trunk and leg motor functions after complete paralysis

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Léonie Asboth, Nawal Noëlle Kinany, Salif Axel Komi, Silvestro Micera, Grégoire Courtine, Miroslav Caban, Quentin Barraud, Marco Capogrosso, Fabien Bertrand Paul Wagner, Robin Jonathan Demesmaeker, Andreas Rowald, Nathan Antoine Greiner, Jocelyne Bloch, Sergio Daniel Hernandez, Laura Ann McCracken, Henri Charles Alexandre Lorach, Edeny Baaklini, Jimmy James Ravier, Carmina Andrea Galvez Solano

Epidural electrical stimulation (EES) targeting the dorsal roots of lumbosacral segments restores walking in people with spinal cord injury (SCI). However, EES is delivered with multielectrode paddle leads that were originally designed to target the dorsal ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2022

Open-access quantitative MRI data of the spinal cord and reproducibility across participants, sites and manufacturers

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Christian Büchel, Nawal Noëlle Kinany, Maryam Seif, Maxime Descoteaux

In a companion paper by Cohen-Adad et al. we introduce the spine generic quantitative MRI protocol that provides valuable metrics for assessing spinal cord macrostructural and microstructural integrity. This protocol was used to acquire a single subject da ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2021

Central and peripheral mechanisms: a multimodal approach to understanding and restoring human motor control

Nawal Noëlle Kinany

All human actions involve motor control. Even the simplest movement requires the coordinated recruitment of many muscles, orchestrated by neuronal circuits in the brain and the spinal cord. As a consequence, lesions affecting the central nervous system, su ...

EPFL2020

A multimodal approach to capture post-stroke temporal dynamics of recovery

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Jenifer Cléa Miehlbradt, Nawal Noëlle Kinany, Elvira Pirondini, Silvestro Micera, Martina Coscia, Christian Giang, Camilla Pierella

Objective.Several training programs have been developed in the past to restore motor functions after stroke. Their efficacy strongly relies on the possibility to assess individual levels of impairment and recovery rate. However, commonly used clinical scal ...

2020

Motor improvement estimation and task adaptation for personalized robot-aided therapy: a feasibility study

Jenifer Cléa Miehlbradt, Nawal Noëlle Kinany, Elvira Pirondini, Silvestro Micera, Martina Coscia, Christian Giang, Camilla Pierella

Background In the past years, robotic systems have become increasingly popular in upper limb rehabilitation. Nevertheless, clinical studies have so far not been able to confirm superior efficacy of robotic therapy over conventional methods. The personaliza ...

2020

Dynamic Functional Connectivity of Resting-State Spinal Cord fMRI Reveals Fine-Grained Intrinsic Architecture

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Nawal Noëlle Kinany

The neuroimaging community has shown tremendous interest in exploring the brain's spontaneous activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). On the contrary, the spinal cord has been largely overlooked despite its pivotal role in processing s ...

2020

Functional imaging of rostrocaudal spinal activity during upper limb motor tasks

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Roberto Martuzzi, Nawal Noëlle Kinany, Elvira Pirondini, Silvestro Micera

The spinal cord is the main interface between the brain and the periphery. It notably plays a central role in motor control, as spinal motoneurons activate skeletal muscles involved in voluntary movements. Yet, the spinal mechanisms underlying human moveme ...

ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE2019

System for personalized robotic therapy and related methods

Nawal Noëlle Kinany, Elvira Pirondini, Silvestro Micera, Christian Giang, Camilla Pierella

The present invention provides an apparatus and a method able to estimate motor improvement in real-time during three-dimensional rehabilitation tasks and to consequently dynamically personalize the therapy.The method can be carried out by a computer progr ...

2019

Long-term usability and bio-integration of polyimide-based intraneural stimulating electrodes

Sophie Marie Marthe Wurth, Jérôme Gandar, Nawal Noëlle Kinany, Silvestro Micera, Grégoire Courtine, Stanisa Raspopovic, Quentin Barraud, Alessandra Piersigilli, Marco Capogrosso, Natalia Pavlova, Jacopo Rigosa, Polina Shkorbatova

Stimulation of peripheral nerves has transiently restored lost sensation and has the potential to alleviate motor deficits. However, incomplete characterization of the long-term usability and bio-integration of intra-neural implants has restricted their us ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2017