4.6 Article

A Novel Muscle Synergy Extraction Method Used for Motor Function Evaluation of Stroke Patients: A Pilot Study

Journal

SENSORS
Volume 21, Issue 11, Pages -

Publisher

MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/s21113833

Keywords

muscle synergy; MCR-ALS; sparseness; electromyography; motor function; stroke

Funding

  1. China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [2019M662128]
  2. Major Scientific and Technological Projects in Ningbo City [2018B10073, 2019B10034]
  3. Key Research and Development Program of Zhejiang Province [2019C03090]
  4. Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China [LQ20F030003, LQ19F030002]
  5. Ningbo Natural Science Foundation [2019A610089]

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This paper presents a novel muscle synergy extraction method based on MCR-ALS and compares it with NMF and SMMA algorithms, showing that MCR-ALS has better performance. MCR-ALS was used to analyze muscle synergy in upper limb movements of healthy and stroke subjects, demonstrating higher repeatability and intra-subject consistency compared to NMF, especially in evaluating motor function reliability.
In this paper, we present a novel muscle synergy extraction method based on multivariate curve resolution-alternating least squares (MCR-ALS) to overcome the limitation of the nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) method for extracting non-sparse muscle synergy, and we study its potential application for evaluating motor function of stroke survivors. Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is the most widely used method for muscle synergy extraction. However, NMF is susceptible to components' sparseness and usually provides inferior reliability, which significantly limits the promotion of muscle synergy. In this study, MCR-ALS was employed to extract muscle synergy from electromyography (EMG) data. Its performance was compared with two other matrix factorization algorithms, NMF and self-modeling mixture analysis (SMMA). Simulated data sets were utilized to explore the influences of the sparseness and noise on the extracted synergies. As a result, the synergies estimated by MCR-ALS were the most similar to true synergies as compared with SMMA and NMF. MCR-ALS was used to analyze the muscle synergy characteristics of upper limb movements performed by healthy (n = 11) and stroke (n = 5) subjects. The repeatability and intra-subject consistency were used to evaluate the performance of MCR-ALS. As a result, MCR-ALS provided much higher repeatability and intra-subject consistency as compared with NMF, which were important for the reliability of the motor function evaluation. The stroke subjects had lower intra-subject consistency and seemingly had more synergies as compared with the healthy subjects. Thus, MCR-ALS is a promising muscle synergy analysis method for motor function evaluation of stroke patients.

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