Cortical neuron response properties are related to lesion extent and behavioral recovery after sensory loss from spinal cord injury in monkeys.

Lesions of the dorsal columns at a mid-cervical level render the hand representation of the contralateral primary somatosensory cortex (area 3b) unresponsive. Over weeks of recovery, most of this cortex becomes responsive to touch on the hand. Determining functional properties of neurons within the hand representation is critical to understanding the neural basis of this adaptive plasticity. Here, we recorded neural activity across the hand representation of area 3b with a 100-electrode array and compared results from owl monkeys and squirrel monkeys 5-10 weeks after lesions with controls. Even after extensive lesions, performance on reach-to-grasp tasks returned to prelesion levels, and hand touches activated territories mainly within expected cortical locations. However, some digit representations were abnormal, such that receptive fields of presumably reactivated neurons were larger and more often involved discontinuous parts of the hand compared with controls. Hand stimulation evoked similar neuronal firing rates in lesion and control monkeys. By assessing the same monkeys with multiple measures, we determined that properties of neurons in area 3b were highly correlated with both the lesion severity and the impairment of hand use. We propose that the reactivation of neurons with near-normal response properties and the recovery of near-normal somatotopy likely supported the recovery of hand use. Given the near-completeness of the more extensive dorsal column lesions we studied, we suggest that alternate spinal afferents, in addition to the few spared primary axon afferents in the dorsal columns, likely have a major role in the reactivation pattern and return of function.