Genital Cortex: Development of the Genital Homunculus

App-Mohedo®: A mobile app for the management of chronic pelvic pain. A design and development study

BACKGROUND

Chronic Pelvic Pain (CPP) has been described as a public health priority worldwide, and it is among the most prevalent and costly healthcare problems. Graded motor imagery (GMI) is a therapeutic tool that has been successfully used to improve pain in several chronic conditions. GMI therapy is divided into three stages: laterality training (LRJT, Left Right Judgement Task), imagined movements, and mirror therapy. No tool that allows working with LRJT in pelvic floor has been developed to date.

OBJECTIVE

This research aims to describe the process followed for the development of a highly usable, multi-language and multi-platform mobile application using GMI with LRJT to improve the treatment of patients with CPP. In addition, this will require achieving two other goals: firstly, to generate 550 pelvic floor images and, subsequently, to carry out an empirical study to objectively classify them into different difficulty levels of. This will allow the app to properly organize and plan the different therapy sessions to be followed by each patient.

METHODOLOGY

For the design, evaluation and development of the app, an open methodology of user-centered design (MPIu + a) was applied. Furthermore, to classify and establish the pelvic floor images of the app in different difficulty levels, an observational, cross-sectional study was conducted with 132 volunteers through non-probabilistic sampling.

RESULTS

On one hand, applying MPIu+a, a total of 5 phases were required to generate an easy-to-use mobile application. On the other hand, the 550 pelvic floor images were classified into 3 difficulty levels (based on the percentage of correct answers and response time used by the participants in the classification process of each image): Level 1 (191 images with Accuracy = 100 % and RT = [0-2.5] seconds); Level 2 (208 images with Accuracy = 75-100 % and RT = [2.5-5] seconds); and Level 3 (151 images with Accuracy = 50-75 % and RT > 5 s).

CONCLUSION

App-Mohedo® is the first multi-platform, multi-language and easy-to-use mobile application that, through GMI with LRJT, and with an adequate bank of images classified into three levels of difficulty, can be used as a complementary therapeutic tool in the treatment of patients with CPP. This work can also serve as an example, model or guide when applying a user-centered methodology, as MPIu + a, to the development of other apps, especially in the field of health.

Females exhibit smaller volumes of brain activation and lower inter-subject variability during motor tasks

Past work has shown that brain structure and function differ between females and males. Males have larger cortical and sub-cortical volume and surface area (both total and subregional), while females have greater cortical thickness in most brain regions. Functional differences are also reported in the literature, yet to date little work has systematically considered whether patterns of brain activity indexed with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) differ between females and males. The current study sought to remediate this issue by employing task-based whole brain motor mapping analyses using an openly available dataset. We tested differences in patterns of functional brain activity associated with 12 voluntary movement patterns in females versus males. Results suggest that females exhibited smaller volumes of brain activation across all 12 movement tasks, and lower patterns of variability in 10 of the 12 movements. We also observed that females had greater cortical thickness, which is in alignment with previous analyses of structural differences. Overall, these findings provide a basis for considering biological sex in future fMRI research and provide a foundation of understanding differences in how neurological pathologies present in females vs males.

Implicit Motor Imagery for Chronic Pelvic Pain: A Cross-Sectional Case-Control Study

Implicit motor imagery (IMI), with an image laterality discrimination (LD) task, has been proposed as a useful therapeutic tool to restore body schema in patients with chronic pelvic pain (CPP). The aim of this study was to analyse the existence of differences between patients with CPP and healthy individuals in order to justify the use of IMI. An observational, cross-sectional study with non-probabilistic sampling was designed as a one-to-one matched case-control study. Through a web link designed for this purpose, a total of 40 abdominoperineal images were shown to 130 participants during the laterality task. Outcome measures were pain intensity (visual analogue scale, VAS), accuracy, response time (RT), and CPPQ-Mohedo score (Chronic Pelvic Pain Questionnaire-Mohedo). This was an observational, cross-sectional study with a total of 64 CPP patients and 66 healthy individuals. The comparative analysis between groups revealed significant differences in accuracy, CPPQ-Mohedo and VAS (p < 0.001), but not in RT; in patients with CPP, accuracy was correlated with a lower CPPQ-Mohedo score and RT and, the greater the pain intensity, the higher the CPPQ-Mohedo score and RT, and the lower the accuracy. In the LD task, the patients with CPP made more mistakes than the healthy individuals. IMI could be a useful and complementary tool in the therapeutic approach for patients with CPP.