neuromuscular disorder
Electromyography Signal Classification Using Deep Learning
Gaso, Mekia Shigute, Cankurt, Selcuk, Subasi, Abdulhamit
We have implemented a deep learning model with L2 regularization and trained it on Electromyography (EMG) data. The data comprises of EMG signals collected from control group, myopathy and ALS patients. Our proposed deep neural network consists of eight layers; five fully connected, two batch normalization and one dropout layers. The data is divided into training and testing sections by subsequently dividing the training data into sub-training and validation sections. Having implemented this model, an accuracy of 99 percent is achieved on the test data set. The model was able to distinguishes the normal cases (control group) from the others at a precision of 100 percent and classify the myopathy and ALS with high accuracy of 97.4 and 98.2 percents, respectively. Thus we believe that, this highly improved classification accuracies will be beneficial for their use in the clinical diagnosis of neuromuscular disorders.
Shape Analysis for Pediatric Upper Body Motor Function Assessment
Kumar, Shashwat, Gutierez, Robert, Datta, Debajyoti, Tolman, Sarah, McCrady, Allison, Blemker, Silvia, Scharf, Rebecca J., Barnes, Laura
Neuromuscular disorders, such as Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) and Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), cause progressive muscular degeneration and loss of motor function for 1 in 6,000 children. Traditional upper limb motor function assessments do not quantitatively measure patient-performed motions, which makes it difficult to track progress for incremental changes. Assessing motor function in children with neuromuscular disorders is particularly challenging because they can be nervous or excited during experiments, or simply be too young to follow precise instructions. These challenges translate to confounding factors such as performing different parts of the arm curl slower or faster (phase variability) which affects the assessed motion quality. This paper uses curve registration and shape analysis to temporally align trajectories while simultaneously extracting a mean reference shape. Distances from this mean shape are used to assess the quality of motion. The proposed metric is invariant to confounding factors, such as phase variability, while suggesting several clinically relevant insights. First, there are statistically significant differences between functional scores for the control and patient populations (p$=$0.0213$\le$0.05). Next, several patients in the patient cohort are able to perform motion on par with the healthy cohort and vice versa. Our metric, which is computed based on wearables, is related to the Brooke's score ((p$=$0.00063$\le$0.05)), as well as motor function assessments based on dynamometry ((p$=$0.0006$\le$0.05)). These results show promise towards ubiquitous motion quality assessment in daily life.
Innovative wheelchair design isn't for all wheelchair users
You'll often see positive news stories coming out of the tech press involving robotics projects that are designed to help people with mobility issues. Exoskeletons, like Toyota's WelWalk, ReWalk, and Ekso Bionics' eponymous walking frame, help people regain the use of their legs. Sit-stand wheelchairs are currently gaining lots of attention, and they do offer, for many people, much greater freedom and independence than standard chairs. But more often than not, they're designed for people with specific disability requirements -- and that means not everyone will get to use them. Not all disabilities are the same, and because they manifest themselves in different ways, it's hard to make generalizations.
Rule Based Expert System for Diagnosis of Neuromuscular Disorders
Borgohain, Rajdeep, Sanyal, Sugata
In this paper, we discuss the implementation of a rule based expert system for diagnosing neuromuscular diseases. The proposed system is implemented as a rule based expert system in JESS for the diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy, Multiple Sclerosis, Muscular Dystrophy and Parkinson's disease. In the system, the user is presented with a list of questionnaires about the symptoms of the patients based on which the disease of the patient is diagnosed and possible treatment is suggested. The system can aid and support the patients suffering from neuromuscular diseases to get an idea of their disease and possible treatment for the disease.