Unsupervised discrimination of motor unit action potentials using spectrograms

Thuy T. Pham, Andrew J. Fuglevand, Alistair L. McEwan, Philip H.W. Leong

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Single motor unit activity study is a major research interest because changes of MUAP morphology, MU activation, and MU recruitment provide the most informative part in diagnosis and treatment of neuromuscular disorders. Intramuscular recordings often provide a more than one motor unit activities, thus MUAP discrimination is a crucial task to study single unit activities. Most neurology laboratories worldwide still need specialists who spend hours to classify MUAPs. In this study, we present a new real-time unsupervised method for MUAP discrimination. After automatically detect MUAPs, we extract features of spectrogram images from the wavelet coefficients of MUAPs. Unlike benchmark methods, we do not calculate Euclidean distances which assumes a spherical distribution of data. Instead, we measure correlation between spectrogram images. Then MUAPs are automatically discriminated without any prior knowledge of the number of clusters as in previous works. MUAP were detected on a real data set with a precision PPV of 94% (tolerance of 2 ms). We obtained a similar result in MUAP classification to the reference. The difference in percentages of MU proportions between our method and the reference were 3% for MU1, 0.4% for MU2, and 12% for MU3. In contrast, F1-score for MU3 reached the highest level at 91% (PPV at the highest of 96.64% as well).

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2014 36th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2014
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages1-4
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781424479290
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 2 2014
Event2014 36th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2014 - Chicago, United States
Duration: Aug 26 2014Aug 30 2014

Publication series

Name2014 36th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2014

Other

Other2014 36th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityChicago
Period8/26/148/30/14

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Health Informatics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Biomedical Engineering
  • General Medicine

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Unsupervised discrimination of motor unit action potentials using spectrograms'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this