Stylohyoid and Posterior Digastric Measurement with Intramuscular EMG, Submental EMG and Swallowing Sound

Stylohyoid and Posterior Digastric Recruitment Pattern Evaluation in Swallowing and Non-swallowing Tasks

“…The resulting signal has been shown to be made of 3 main bursts of sound, separated in time and associated with swallowing events, where the major burst was associated with the UES bolus flow and was the only one to be present 100% of the time [13,19]. The possibility to precisely localize that event in time was shown in our previous work [17].…”

“…The burst of higher amplitude and frequency in the ACC signal corresponds to the UES bolus flow, which defines the temporal limit for the detection. The full acquisition protocol is detailed in our previous work [17].…”

“…This later event will be called UES bolus flow, for conciseness. The acquisition method is briefly detailed hereafter, but the full procedure is available in the related paper [17].…”

“…Also, EMG is prone to background noise and especially spurious spikes from intramuscular EMG, because of a few surrounding muscle fibers that react to the presence of the needles. To effectively account for it, several methods were compared (integrated profile, sample entropy, Bayesian changepoint analysis) and the generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) method [17] was the most effective to abstract from the noise, as it allowed us to model the signals. It was computed on a 100ms sliding window as recommended by the original paper [32], and with an exponential probability density function to represent the TKEO-transformed raw EMG [28].…”

“…Then, the swallowing sound exhibits a major burst of activity when the bolus enters the UES, and the TKEOtransform signals allowed to bring that event out. Its beginning could therefore easily be placed manually [17].…”