Automatic decomposition of pediatric high density surface EMG: A pilot study

This pilot study presents a novel application of high density surface electromyography (EMG) decomposition in pediatric patients, with a view toward promoting its potential clinical application for examination of pediatric neuromuscular diseases. Automatic progressive FastICA peel-off (APFP) framework was used to decompose high density surface EMG signals recorded from the first dorsal interosseous and abductor pollicis brevis muscles of children with spinal muscular atrophy. The performance of the decomposition with reduced EMG recording channels was also investigated. In total 131 motor units were extracted from 15 trials of 64-channel (8 ​× ​8) surface EMG. The decomposition yield reduced to 102 motor units when 36-channel (6 ​× ​6) was used, among which 84 motor units were common ones with an average matching rate of (95.68 ​± ​5.26) %. The decomposition yield further reduced to 65 motor units when only 16-channel (4 ​× ​4) was used, among which 57 were common ones with an average matching rate of (95.99 ​± ​4.56) %. These results indicate that using the APFP framework single motor unit activity can be reliably and automatically extracted from pediatric surface EMG signals recorded by an electrode array, which can facilitate potential clinical application of surface EMG as an alternative or supplement to invasive needle EMG for examination of neuromuscular diseases in children.