USE OF SIGNAL REPRESENTATION TO IDENTIFY ABNORMAL MOTOR UNIT POTENTIALS IN MACRO EMG.

Macro electromyography (EMG) is a recently described recording technique allowing a nonselective recording of motor unit activity. The pick-up area of the electrode, the cannula of a modified single-fiber electrode, covers the entire motor unit territory. The motor unit potential (MUP) is obtained by averaging the cannula signals that are time locked to a single-fiber action potential. In the present report, a pattern recognition system is described which assumes no prior information about the normal and abnormal MUP's and treats the entire MUP waveform as a feature. Signal representation is used to reduce the dimensionality of the data and produced a satisfactory representation of MUP's by 20 basis vectors. The principal components of the MUP's from control subjects indicate that the features of MUP's from the control subjects form a single cluster in the feature space. Performance of the pattern recognition scheme developed was found to be superior to the conventional technique of amplitude measurements.

Duke Scholars

Author Donald Benjamin Sanders Neurology, Neuromuscular Disease