An intracortical brain-machine interface based on macaque ventral premotor activity

The majority of brain-machine interface (BMI) studies have focused on decoding intended movements based on neural activity of primary motor (M1) and dorsal premotor cortex (PMd). The ventral premotor cortex (PMv), and more specifically area F5c, has been implicated in object grasping and action observation, and may represent an alternative for motor BMI control due to its phasic modulation during action observation. Using chronically implanted Utah arrays in F5c, PMd, and M1 in two male macaques, we compared the efficacy of controlling a motor BMI based on neural activity of each area. PMv decoding reached similar or even higher success rates than M1 and PMd in a 2D cursor control task, especially when controlling for the number of motion selective channels that were used by the decoder. We found similar results during a 2D robot avatar control task in a simulated 3D environment. At both the multi-unit and the population level, neural responses in all areas were highly similar during th..., , This README.md file was generated on 2026-01-22 by Sofie De Schrijver

## Data for the study 'An intracortical brain-machine interface based on macaque ventral premotor activity'

\[Access this dataset on Dryad, DOI: 10.5061/dryad.jsxksn0qd]

This dataset was generated to assess the effectivity of a brain-computer interface (BCI) based on ventral premotor activity. During BCI control in this study, the subjects tried to move a cursor or a virtual avatar robot arm on a screen with only his brain activity. It has been shown that this can be done with neural activity from the primary motor cortex (M1) and the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd), but it is unknown if this also works with activity from the ventral premotor cortex (PMv), and more specifically from ventral premotor area F5c. Therefore, this study compares the BCI performance of two subjects while they use their own neural activity from either PMv, PMd, or M1. The study employed three different tasks that all had the same goal: move t...,