Symbolic integers to access matrices

Let AKL be a numerical 81*101 matrix.

The question is: How to access AKL through symbolic integers?

That is to say, if i and j are symbolic variables (that should represent later the indices of the matrix), how to express a newAKL as a function of the indices i and j. So that we may obtain a single numerical value from the newAKL matrix when substituting numerical integer values for i and j.

We don't want this newAKL to be a matrix any more but a sym variable and then a numerical value if substitution has been done on i and j.

By this way, the new AKL can be used in calculation not allowed for matrices as a sym variable and substituted by a numerical value taken from the initial AKL matrix and depending on i and j.

I have tried this without success:

 whos AKL
  Name       Size             Bytes  Class     Attributes

AKL       81x101            65448  double

syms i

syms j

syms newAKL(i, j)

evalin(symengine,'assume(i,Type::Integer)')

evalin(symengine,'assume(j,Type::Integer)')

newAKL=sym(AKL); %failure because newAKL remains a matrix (a sym matrix but still a matrix)

%or,

newAKL(i,j)=AKL(i,j); %also failure because i and j are not integers.(error message:Error using sym/subsindex (line 1367) Indexing input must be numeric, logical or ':'.)

There could be something very simple to get what I want but I'm out of ideas at the moment.