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EMG Diagnosis via AR Modeling and Binary Support Vector Machine

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 Gurmanik Kaur et. al. / International Journal of Engineering Science and Technology
Vol. 2(6), 2010, 1767-1772 
 

EMG Diagnosis via AR Modeling and Binary

Support Vector Machine Classification
GURMANIK KAUR*
Research Scholar, EIE Department,
SLIET (Deemed-to-be-University), Longowal
Distt. Sangrur, Punjab, INDIA
Dr. AJAT SHATRU ARORA
Professor, EIE Department,
SLIET (Deemed-to-be-University), Longowal
Distt. Sangrur, Punjab, INDIA
Dr. VIJENDRA KUMAR JAIN
HOD & Professor, EIE Department,
SLIET (Deemed-to-be-University), Longowal
Distt. Sangrur, Punjab, INDIA

Abstract

There are more than 100 neuromuscular disorders that affect the brain, spinal cord, nerves and muscles. Many of
these diseases are hereditary and life expectancy of many sufferers is considerably reduced. Early detection and
diagnosis of these diseases by clinical examination and laboratory tests is essential for their management as well as
their prevention through prenatal diagnosis and genetic counselling. Such information is also useful in research
which may lead to the understanding of the nature and eventual treatment of these diseases. Laboratory
investigations include neurophysiological tests, nerve and muscle biopsies, biochemical analysis and more recently
DNA analysis for the localization and identification of genes. Electromyographic examination studies the electrical
activity of the muscle and forms a valuable neurophysiological test for the assessment of neuromuscular disorders.
The shapes and firing rates of the motor unit action potentials (MUAPs) in an EMG signal provide an important
source of information for the diagnosis of neuromuscular disorders. In order to extract this information from the
EMG signals recorded at low to moderate force levels, it is required to identify and classify the MUAPs composing
the EMG signal. The identification of possible MUAPs is done by segmentation of EMG signal using threshold
technique. The identified MUAPs are clustered using a statistical pattern recognition technique. After extraction of
autoregressive (AR) features, MUAPs are classified using binary support vector machine (SVM) classifier. A total
of 12 EMG signals obtained from 3 normal (NOR), 5 myopathic (MYO) and 4 motor neuron diseased (MND)
subjects were analyzed. The classification accuracy of binary SVM with AR features is 100%. In conclusion, the
methodology described in this work make possible the development of a fully automatic electromyogram (EMG)
signal analysis which is accurate, simple, fast and reliable enough to be used in routine clinical environment.
Keywords-Electromyography, motor unit action potentials, classification, binary support vector machine.

I. INTRODUCTION

Clinical electromyography analyses the EMG signal recorded from a contracting muscle using a needle
electrode to diagnosis neuromuscular disorders. EMG is composed of MUAPs, generated by the repetitive
discharges of groups of muscle fibers called motor units (MUs). The term motor unit refers collectively to one motor
neuron and the group of muscle fibers it innervates and is the smallest functional unit of the skeletal muscle that can

 
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be activated by volitional efforts. MUAPs from different MUs tend to have distinct shapes, which remain almost the
same for each discharge. These MUAPs can be identified and tracked using different pattern recognition techniques.
The resulting information can be used to determine the neuromuscular diseases [1-3].
A particular neuromuscular disease alters the properties of the muscle and nerve cells, causing characteristic
changes in the MUAPs. When a patient maintains low level of muscle contraction, the individual MUAPs can be
easily recognized. As contraction intensity increases, more MUs are recruited. Different MUAPs will overlap,
causing an interference pattern in which the neurophysiologist cannot detect individual shapes reliably.
Traditionally, in clinical electromyography, neurophysiologists assess MUAPs from their shapes using an
oscilloscope and listening to their audio characteristics. Thus, an experienced neurophysiologist can detect
abnormalities with reasonable accuracy. However, subjective MUAP assessment, although satisfactory for the
detection of unequivocal abnormalities, may not be sufficient to delineate less obvious deviations or mixed patterns
of abnormalities [4]. These ambiguous cases call for quantitative MUAP analysis.
With the aid of computer technology, today it is possible to analyze EMG signals quantitatively that helps in
saving time, standardizes the measurements and enables the extraction of additional features which cannot be easily
calculated manually. A number of computer based quantitative EMG analysis algorithms have been developed in the
past. Coatrieux and associates applied cluster analysis techniques for the automatic diagnosis of pathology based on
MUAP records [5]-[7]. Andreassen and co-workers developed the MUNIN (Muscle and Nerve Inference Network)
which employs a causal probabilistic network for the interpretation of EMG findings [8]-[10]. Fuglsang-Frederiksen
and his group developed a rule-based EMG expert system named KANDID [11], [12] and Jamieson [13], [14]
developed an EMG processing system based on augmented transition networks. In most of these systems, the
generation of the input pattern assumes a probabilistic model, with the matching score representing the likelihood
that the input pattern was generated from the underlying class [15]. In addition, assumptions are typically made
concerning the probability density function of the input data. Pattichis et al gave a series research yield of classifying
MUAPs for differentiation of motor neuron diseases and myopathies from normal [16]. The classifier they used
were mainly neural networks, e.g. back propagation, the radial basis function and the self organizing feature map
network. However, the aforementioned techniques used to train the neural network classifiers are based on the idea
of minimizing the train error, which is named empirical risk. As a result, limited amount of training data and over
high training accuracy often lead to over training instead of good classification performance.
SVM introduced by Vapnik [17] is founded in the framework of the statistical learning theory, which is
appropriate for approaching classification and regression problems. They operate on the induction principle of
structural risk minimization, which minimizes an upper bound on the generalization error. SVMs have shown to be
successful in solving many pattern recognition problems [18] and perform much better than non-linear classifiers
such as artificial neural networks in many situations [19].
In this preliminary study, we investigated the binary SVM classifier for classification of MUAPs recorded
from the biceps brochii muscle. The experimental results proved that the SVM can effectively classify NOR, MYO
MND and MYO subjects from NOR.
This paper is organized as follows: Section II presented the material and methodology used for classification
of MUAPs. The experimental results are illustrated in section III and section IV covered the conclusion.

II. MATERIAL AND METHODOLOGY

A. Data Acquisition and Pre-processing

Our data contain real time EMG signal obtained from the Department of Computer Science, University of
Cyprus, Cyprus. All the EMG signals were acquired from the biceps brochii muscle at upto 30% of the maximum
voluntary contraction (MVC) level under isometric conditions. The signals were acquired for 5 seconds, using the
standard concentric needle electrode, from NOR, MYO and MND subjects. The EMG signals were analogue band
pass filtered at 3-10 KHz, sampled at 20 KHz with 12-bit resolution and then low pass filtered at 8 KHz. A typical
EMG recording is shown in Fig.1.

 
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300

200

Magnitude(µV)
100

-100

-200

0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000

Sample No.

Fig. 1. Raw EMG signal.

B. Segmentation

EMG signal is the superposition of the electrical activities of the several motor units. The segmentation of
EMG signal is necessary to understand the mechanisms related to muscle and nerve control. This segmentation
algorithm calculates a threshold depending on the maximum value maxxi  and the mean absolute value
i
L
1 L  xi of the whole EMG signal, where xi are the discrete input values and L is the number of samples in
i 1

the EMG signal. The threshold T  is calculated as follows:

30 L
if maxxi    i 5 L
i L i 1
x , then T   xi
L i 1

else T  max x i  5
i

Peaks over the calculated threshold are considered as candidate MUAP’s. Then a window of 120 sampling
points (i.e., 6 ms at 20 kHz) is centered at the identified peak. If a greater peak is found in the window, the window
is centered at the greater peak; otherwise the 120 points are saved as MUAP waveform [20]. The segmented EMG
signal centered at the maximum peak, is shown in Fig. 2.

400

300

200
Magnitude(µV)

100

-100

-200
0 20 40 60 80 100 120
Sample No.

Fig. 2. Segmented EMG signal in segments of 6ms and centered at the maximum peak.

C. Clustering

In this step, the MUAP clusters are automatically detected and for each cluster the average or template shape
is determined. In this work, we have used statistical pattern recognition technique for clustering of similar MUAPs.
In this technique euclidian distance is used to identify and group similar MUAP waveforms. The group average is
continuously calculated and is used for the classification of MUAPs using a constant threshold [21]. The
implementation steps are:
Step1: Start with the first waveform x as input (the first member of the class).

 
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Step2: Calculate the vector length of x and the distance between it and the other segmented waveforms y as:
N
lx  x i 1
2
i where N  120

and
N
d xy   (x
i 1
i  yi ) 2

Step3: Find the waveform y with the minimum distance d min . The waveform y having minimum distance with
the x has the
greatest similarity with x and remove it from the input data.
Step4: If d min l x < 0.3 then group, calculate group average and go to step 1 with group average as input.

else if number of group members > 2, then form a new class.

else waveform is superimposed, go to step 1 with y as input.

This process continues where it stopped comparing the last encountered waveform with all the remaining
until all waveforms are processed. The threshold values were chosen heuristically after extensive testing. It is noted
that again there are no widely applicable threshold criteria for assigning a MUAP to a class. The threshold used in
this work is critical because a smaller value may split a MUAP class with high waveform variability in two or more
subclasses, whereas a greater threshold value may merge resembling MUAP classes. The averaged class waveforms
are again the unique MUAP waveforms composing the EMG signals. Fig. illustrates a clustered EMG signal.

140
150 300
120
250

100 100
200

80
150
50
60
100

0 40
50

0 20
-50
-50 0

-100 -100 -20

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 0 20 40 60 80 100 120

Fig.3 Clustered MUAPs of an EMG Signal.

D. Feature Extraction

The recorded EMG signal represents a time series that is essentially stochastic. Our algorithm consists of
identifying the features of the time series that is recorded in terms of an autoregressive (AR) model. The AR
coefficients of a signal x[n] satisfy the following equation:
N
xn   a i xn  i   vn
i 1

where ai are the AR model coefficients of order N , xn  is the input signal (EMG signal) and vn is the
white noise [22]. The coefficients of AR model of order 3 were computed by the Burg method producing a total
number of 36 coefficients. Theses coefficients can be considered as the features for a particular type of EMG signal.

 
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E. Classification
A binary SVM classifier is used in this work for classification of clustered MUAPs into NOR, MYO and
MND classes [23], [24]. A classification task based on SVM usually involves training and testing data, which
consist of a number of data instances. Each instance in the training set contains one ‘‘target value’’ (class labels) and
several ‘‘attributes’’. In this work we have used binary SVM classifier first, to classify the normal and diseased
subjects. If the signal is diseased, then another binary classifier is used to classify MYO and MND signals.

III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

EMG data collected from 12 subjects were analyzed using the methodology described in Section II. Data
were recorded from 3 NOR, 5 MYO and 4 MND subjects. Only subjects with no history or signs of neuromuscular
disorders were considered as normal. MATLAB was used for implementing the algorithms. The means and standard
deviations of the aforementioned AR features of each subject are computed as the input feature vector of binary
SVM classifier. The two important advantages of AR features over time domain features are: 1) variations in the
positioning of the electrodes on the surface of the muscle do not severely affect the AR coefficients. 2) the amount
of information to be presented to the classifier is greatly reduced. Therefore, the total processing time is reduced.
The classification accuracy of binary SVM classifier is 100%.

IV. CONCLUSION

An integrated binary classifier based on SVM is adopted in clinical electromyography for differentiating
neuromuscular disorders. The objective of SVM is to find optimal hyperplane for separating MUAP clusters.
Experimental results show that the binary SVM classifier can be effectively trained for classification of MUAPs.
Still the diagnostic results could be further investigated in future works with larger data set and other feature sets.

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Vol. 2(6), 2010, 1767-1772 
 
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