Intramuscular EMG classifier for detecting myopathy and neuropathy

Abstract

This article presents an automatic diagnostic system to classify intramuscular electromyography (iEMG) signals, thereby detecting neuromuscular disorders. To this end, we tailored the center symmetric local binary pattern (CSLBP) to analyze one‐dimensional (1‐D) signals. In this approach, the 1‐D CSLBP feature extracted from a decimated iEMG signal is fed to a combination of classifiers, which in turn assigns a set of labels to the signal, and ultimately the signal category is determined by the Boyer‐Moore majority voting (BMMV) algorithm. The proposed framework was investigated with a benchmark iEMG dataset that contains signals recorded from three different muscles: biceps brachii (BB), deltoideus (DE), and vastus medialis (VM). In a repeated 10‐fold cross‐validation, CSLBP‐Combined‐Classifiers‐BMMV (CSLBP‐CC‐BMMV) achieved an average classification accuracy of 92.80%, 94.25%, and 93.71% for the iEMG signals recorded from BB, DE, and VM muscle, respectively. Interestingly, the performance of CSLBP‐CC‐BMMV surpassed the other published approaches and ensemble learning methods that are akin to our scheme in terms of classification accuracy and computational time.