Pierre Nicolo

Pierre Nicolo
Haute école de santé Genève · Department of Physiotherapy

PhD

About

27
Publications
3,273
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531
Citations
Introduction
After a Bachelor in physical therapy at the School of Health Sciences (HESAV) in Lausanne, I worked as physical therapist in acute hospitals, ambulatory care and cardiovascular rehabilitation. Then, I completed a master degree in Human Movement and Sport Science at the University of Lausanne while working concurrently as assistant of education at the Higher School of Health in Geneva (HEDs). In 2016, I obtained a PhD in Neuroscience l Neuroscience, University of Geneva. Pierre does research in Physiotherapy, Neurology and Clinical Trials. Their most recent publication is 'Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Reduces Secondary White-Matter Degradation After Stroke: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on NeuroRehabilitation (ICNR2018), October 16-20, 2018, Pisa, Italy'.

Publications

Publications (27)
Article
Full-text available
Following a stroke in regions of the brain responsible for motor activity, patients can lose their ability to control parts of their body. Over time, some patients recover almost completely, while others barely recover at all. It is known that lesion volume, initial motor impairment and cortico-spinal tract asymmetry significantly impact motor chan...
Article
Background: Following an acute ischemic stroke, some patients recover almost completely, while others barely recover. It is known that lesion volume, initial motor impairment, and cortico-spinal tract asymmetry (benchmark features) significantly impact motor changes over time. However, accurate prediction models of patients’ recovery are still miss...
Article
Full-text available
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 scales rely mainly on subjective functional assessments and are not able to provide a complete d...
Article
Full-text available
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 personalization of robot-aided therapy according to the patients' individual motor deficits has been su...
Preprint
Background In the past years, robotic systems have become increasingly popular in both upper and lower limb rehabilitation. Nevertheless, clinical studies have so far not been able to confirm superior efficacy of robotic therapy over conventional methods. The personalization of robot-aided therapy according to the patients’ individual motor deficit...
Chapter
The integrity of muscle synergies patterns has been proposed as a physiological marker of cortical damage but how to modify and train muscle synergies to relearn movement is still an open question. Here we present our recent results about the modifications that the forces induced by robots can cause on upper limb muscle synergies after stroke. Our...
Chapter
The lesions induced by unilateral strokes perturb the complex and critical interhemispheric balance. While a high asymmetry measured in the acute phase is known to be a predictor for poor motor recovery, the evolution of this imbalance along motor recovery has not been studied. Here, we evaluated the evolution of the cortical power asymmetry during...
Chapter
Stroke is a devastating neurological condition, often causing severe functional and cognitive deficits, sharply diminishing the patient’s quality of life. Among others, robot-assisted rehabilitation has been widely proposed to enhance the rehabilitation outcome. However, clinical scores and robotic parameters often used to inform rehabilitative-dec...
Chapter
Full-text available
Clinical studies have so far not been able to show if robotic therapy is superior to conventional methods. The personalization of robot-assisted therapy according to the individual motor deficits might contribute to reach this goal. Here we present a statistical approach to automatically personalize robotic rehabilitation. Our method uses different...
Chapter
Motor deficit is a prominent feature among stroke survivors. Robot-assisted therapies have been proposed as a strategy to boost rehabilitation, by allowing therapy to be provided in a more reproducible and intense manner, while quantitatively monitoring patient’s improvement. However, those approaches have so far not shown superiority over conventi...
Chapter
Recent studies demonstrated that stroke patients with large lesion to the cortico-spinal tract (CST) show secondary degradation of ipsilesional white matter tracts and poor motor recovery (POOR) in the subacute period. This suggests that white matter preservation might be an interesting target for this group of patients and might help improve motor...
Article
Full-text available
Synchronization of neural activity as measured with functional connectivity (FC) is increasingly used to study the neural basis of brain disease and to develop new treatment targets. However, solid evidence for a causal role of FC in disease and therapy is lacking. Here, we manipulated FC of the ipsilesional primary motor cortex in ten chronic huma...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: To investigate the effects of cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) on neural network connectivity and motor recovery in individuals with subacute stroke. Design: Double-blinded, randomized, placebo-controlled study. Setting: Stroke subjects recruited through a universi...
Article
Background: Evolution of motor function during the first months after stroke is stereotypically bifurcated, consisting of either recovery to about 70% of maximum possible improvement ("proportional recovery, PROP") or in little to no improvement ("poor recovery, POOR"). There is currently no evidence that any rehabilitation treatment will prevent...
Article
Full-text available
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) has demonstrated beneficial effects on motor learning. It would be important to obtain a similar enhancement for verbal learning. However, previous studies have mostly assessed short-term effects of rTMS on language performance and the effect on learning is largely unknown. This study examined whe...
Article
Full-text available
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) has demonstrated beneficial effects on motor learning. It would be important to obtain a similar enhancement for verbal learning. However, previous studies have mostly assessed short-term effects of rTMS on language performance and the effect on learning is largely unknown. This study examined whe...
Article
Reliable predictors of motor improvement in individual patients after stroke are scarce. Acute determination of upper limb Fugl-Meyer assessment (FMA) appears to have predictive value.1,2 This approach predicts that patients will improve approximately 70% of the difference between the maximum upper extremity FMA score and the score first tested for...
Article
Full-text available
Recent findings have demonstrated that stroke lesions affect neural communication in the entire brain. However, it is less clear whether network interactions are also relevant for plasticity and repair. This study investigated whether the coherence of neural oscillations at language or motor nodes is associated with future clinical improvement. Twe...

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