INTRODUCTION
stroke, upper limb impairment, Stroke, long‐term adult disability
STROKE, STROKE
Stroke represents a major cause of long‐term adult disability worldwide.Mental practice of movements, also known as motor imagery training (MIT), has attracted much interest for its potential for neurorehabilitation to improve upper limb function.Neural plasticity forms the intrinsic basis of neurorehabilitation for modern rehabilitation medicine and has been applied in restoring motor functions after stroke. Recently, motor task‐based neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that motor relearning is accompanied by reorganizing of motor networks.Passive movements are an alternative to the task of active movements. An fMRI study showed that an active or passive palm‐finger brushing task produced broadly equivalent brain activation in the sensorimotor areas in healthy adults.In addition to the activation analysis, the functional connectivity (FC) analysis may provide more information about the mechanism underlying the treatment effects of MIT at the brain network level. Simple task‐related brain activity is frequently more intensive and with a broader range of activation in stroke patients than in healthy controls, while more complex tasks usually involve lower levels of cortical activity.To deepen our understanding of the neural mechanism of MIT in stroke patients with poor motor function, we recruited patients with moderate to severe upper limb impairment and adopted a passive hand movement task for fMRI scanning. We hypothesized that in this major target patient population, the efficacy of MIT is associated with specific reorganizations in the motor network, which we aimed to reveal in this study from brain activation and seed‐based FC analyses.