Lower extremity Interlimb coordination associated brain activity in young female athletes: A biomechanically instrumented neuroimaging study

Bilateral sensorimotor coordination is required for everyday activities, such as walking and sitting down/standing up from a chair. Sensorimotor coordination functional neuroimaging (fMRI) paradigms (e.g., stepping, cycling) increase activity in the sensorimotor cortex, supplementary motor area, insula, and cerebellum. Although these paradigms are designed to assay coordination, performance measures are rarely collected simultaneously with fMRI. Therefore, we aimed to identify neural correlates of lower extremity coordination using a bilateral, in‐phase, multi‐joint coordination task with concurrent MRI‐compatible 3D motion analysis. Seventeen female athletes (15.0 ± 1.4 years) completed a bilateral, multi‐joint lower‐extremity coordination task during brain fMRI. Interlimb coordination was quantified from kinematic data as the correlation between peak‐to‐peak knee flexion cycle time between legs. Standard preprocessing and whole‐brain analyses for task‐based fMRI were completed in FSL, controlling for total movement cycles and neuroanatomical differences, with interlimb coordination as a covariate of interest. A clusterwise multi‐comparison correction was applied at z > 3.1 and p