Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 71 (2022) 103098

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Biomedical Signal Processing and Control

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/bspc

Automated diagnosis of muscle diseases from EMG signals using empirical

mode decomposition based method
Rahul Dubey a, Mohit Kumar b, Abhay Upadhyay c, *, Ram Bilas Pachori d
a
Department of Electronics Engineering, Madhav Institute of Technology and Science, Gwalior, India
b
R&D Department, OMKARR Tech, New Delhi, India
c
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Institute of Engineering and Technology, Bundelkhand University, Jhansi, India
d
Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Indore, Indore 453552, India

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Muscle activity decreases due to various conditions like age factors and muscle diseases namely, amyotrophic
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis lateral sclerosis (ALS) and myopathy. Electromyogram (EMG) signals are regularly explored by specialists to
Electromyogram analyze the irregularity of muscles. Manual investigation of EMG signals is a tedious task for medical practi­
Myopathy
tioners. Therefore, this work proposes a new method for classifying the ALS, myopathy, and normal EMG signals.
Empirical mode decomposition
Intrinsic mode functions
In the proposed method, the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method is applied to decompose the EMG
signals into intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). The suitable IMFs for feature selection are selected using the t-test
based approach and used to compute the foot distances denoted as fp1 and fp2 by constructing the complex plane
plot. The quadrilateral is drawn over a complex plot by considering fp1 and fp2 as a diagonal of it, followed by
calculating the area (A) and circumference (CF) of the quadrilateral. These measures are utilized for separating
the three classes of myopathy, ALS, and normal EMG signals. The proposed algorithm has been trained and
validated using a feed forward neural network (FFNN), support vector machine (SVM), and decision tree. The
algorithm, when tested with a FFNN, achieved the maximum classification accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity
of 99.53%, 99.25% and 99.60%, respectively.

1. Introduction In literature, various automated methods are proposed for investi­

The actions of muscles are controlled through electrical impulses
generated in the brain. These impulses are traversed via the peripheral
nervous system to a specific location in the body. This function may be
interrupted by neuromuscular diseases (NMDs) [1]. Amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis (ALS) is one of the major NMD caused by the motor neurons
disorder [2]. ALS may cause weakness, paralysis, failure of the respi­
ratory system, and loss of brain control over muscles [2]. Myopathy is
another disorder of the muscle fiber skin. Myopathy could be caused by
various reasons e.g. infection, injury in the muscle due to medicine, and
hereditary diseases that affect muscle function [3]. These disorders may
worsen over time if left neglected. Therefore, timely diagnosis, medical
intervention, and care are highly recommended. Electromyogram
(EMG) is a tool used by clinicians to diagnose the NMD. The manual
detection of the abnormalities present in EMG signals requires skills and
expertise. Hence, a computer-based approach may be helpful for the
accurate detection of the abnormalities present in the EMG signals.
gating the EMG signals such as k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) based
approach in [4], principal component analysis (PCA) based approach in
[5–7], autoregressive (AR) coefficients-based features [8], and Bayesian
algorithm in [9]. Various other techniques such as cross information
potential and correntropy based method in [10], clustering-based
method [11], and wavelet neural network-based approach [12] are
also found useful to distinguish between normal and abnormal EMG
signals. EMG signal decomposition-based methods such as wavelets
transform-based methods [13–15] and empirical mode decomposition
(EMD) based methodology [16] are exploited to study the normal and
diseased EMG signals. A method based on time-domain features and
SVM classifier was also found suitable for EMG signal classification [17].
In [18], a new method based on improved eigenvalue decomposition of
the Hankel matrix is explored in the analysis of different classes of EMG
signals.
In [19], the authors proposed a classification method for myoelectric
control of hand prostheses using surface EMG signals. In [20], the

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: abhayragav24@gmail.com (A. Upadhyay).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bspc.2021.103098
Received 9 February 2021; Received in revised form 3 July 2021; Accepted 20 August 2021
Available online 3 September 2021
1746-8094/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
R. Dubey et al.
Fig. 1. Block diagram of the proposed algorithm.
authors proposed an approach to characterize human motor units from
surface EMG decomposition. In [21], the authors showed that canonical
correlation analysis performed better than PCA filtering for the removal
of motion artifacts from high-density EMG signals. In [22], the authors
proposed a method to detect NMD using deep feature extraction of cross
wavelet spectra. The research in [23] combines supervised and unsu­
pervised learning methods to classify EMG signals.
In this work, we have used the EMD based visual features for the
classification of ALS, myopathy, and normal class EMG signals. The EMD
based visual features are well established approach for several
biomedical signal processing applications like epileptic seizure classifi­
cation [24–26], identification of normal and diabetic R-R interval sig­
nals [27], detection of coronary artery disease (CAD) heart rate signal
[28], and the classification of lung sound signals [29]. In [24], the area
of phase space representation based visual feature is explored for clas­
sification of seizure activities from EEG signals. The second order dif­
ference plots (SODP) of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) are utilized for
computing the visual features and further explored them to classify the
seizure activity from EEG signals in [25]. The analytic signal represen­
tation based visual features are explored for classification the seizure
activity from EEG signals in [26]. The combination of analytic signal
representation and SODP based visual features are explored for identi­
fication of normal and diabetic RR-interval signals in [27]. In [28], the
CAD heart signal is also classified using the SODP and ASR based visual
features. The multidimensional representation of phase space repre­
sentation based visual features are utilized for classifiying the lung
sound signals in [29]. In this work, we have also explored the analytic
signal representation of the third IMF based complex plane plot for vi­
sual feature computations.
The existing methods for the classification of the EMG signals has
explored the large number of feature sets. Hence, in this work, our
motivation is to achieve high accuracy with lesser number of features as
compared to the earlier studies. Therefore, the presented work aims to
propose new features to investigate the three different classes of EMG
signals, namely; myopathy, ALS, and normal classes.
In this work, our contribution is the extraction of new features from
the complex plane plot of the analytic signal for the classification of EMG
signals. The proposed method requires only two number of features to
achieve the high classification accuracy for the three classes of EMG
signals. Moreover, these features can be used to discriminate the normal,
Myopathy, and ALS EMG signals, visually. The methodology of proposed
work is explained in next section.
2. Methodology
The proposed algorithm is based on the complex plane plot of ana­
lytic signal of IMFs obtained through EMD method [30]. The complex
plane plot of selected IMF is used to extract the features used as an input
to the classifier. In this work, two features, namely area (A) and
circumference (CF) of a quadrilateral are computed using the foot dis­
tances fp1 and fp2 . These features are computed from the complex plane
plot of the analytic signal obtained using the Hilbert transform (HT) [30]
of the IMFs. Further, these features are used as an input to the various
classifiers to classify the EMG signals into the respective classes. The
block diagram of the proposed algorithm is shown in Fig. 1. The
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Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 71 (2022) 103098
proposed algorithm has been tested on the dataset discussed in the
subsection 2.1.
2.1. Database
The proposed methodology for the classification of muscle diseases
using EMG signals has been validated with two online available data­
bases [31,32]. In the first dataset [31], the MedelecSynergy N2 EMG
monitoring system was used to collect the EMG data. The Tibialis
anterior muscle is used to collect the EMG signal using a 25 mm
concentric needle electrode. The needle electrode was repositioned with
respect to the bend of the foot until motor unit action potentials (MUAP)
were identified with a rapid rise time. Three EMG signals were recorded
from three patients. The first subject was 44 years old healthy man with
no NMD, the second patient was 62 years old man with a neuropathy
history due to right L5 radiculopathy, and the third subject was 57 years
old man with a history of myopathy because of polymyositis. The
recording is done at a sampling rate of 50 kHz and then down-sampled to
4 kHz [31]. The 20 Hz high pass filter and 5 kHz low pass analog filter
were used in the recording [31].
In the second dataset [32], a standard concentric and monopolar
needles electrode was used to record the EMG signals from five places in
the muscles with low, medium, and deep levels of insertion. The sam­
pling frequency is kept at 23.435 kHz. Biceps brachii and medial vastus
muscle are used to record the EMG signals. For normal group people,
only biceps brachii muscle was used. However, for myopathy, and ALS
EMG signals, biceps brachii, and medial boast both were used for
recording. The monopolar needle is insulated with Teflon. Two analog
filters with a cutoff frequency of 2 Hz and 10 kHz are used in the
recording.
The dataset consists of a control group of normal classes EMG signals,
a group of patients with myopathy EMG signals, and a group of patients
with ALS EMG signals. The control group consists of normal persons
including 4 females and 6 males aged between 21 to 37 years. The group
of patients with myopathy EMG signals consists of 7 patients including 2
females and 5 males aged between 19 to 63 years. There are 8 patients
including4 females and 4 males in the group of patients with ALS EMG
signals. These patients are aged between 35 to 67 years. In this work,
300 signals of normal EMG class, 315 signals of myopathy, and 332
signals of ALS EMG classes are considered.
In the presented work, we have merged the two databases for the
experimental work. We have down-sampled both datasets to 2 kHz as
the EMG signals lie in the frequency range of 0–500 Hz, and most
dominant between 0–150 Hz [33].
The plot for normal, ALS, and myopathy EMG signals are shown in
Figs. 2(a), 2(b), and 2(c), respectively.
In this work, we have explored the EMD method for analysis of EMG
signals. It is also discussed in subSection 2.2 in detailed manner.
2.2. Empirical mode decomposition
In this work, the EMD method has been applied for the analysis of
EMG signals. The EMD method is very well established method for the
decomposition of the signal into IMFs [30]. EMD decomposes a signal in
IMFs which is arranged from high frequency to low frequency
R. Dubey et al.
Fig. 2. Plots of (a) Normal EMG signal (b) ALS EMG signal (c) Myopathy EMG signal.
Fig. 3. Plots of IMFs of normal EMG signals (a) IMF1(t) (b) IMF2(t) (c) IMF3(t) (d) IMF4(t) (e) IMF5(t) (f) IMF6(t) (g) IMF7(t) (h) IMF8(t) (i) IMF9(t) (j) IMF10(t).
components [30]. Two necessary conditions must be followed by the
components to be IMF, which are written below [30].
• The extrema number and zero crossing number should be maximum
differ by one.
• Envelope defined by local maxima and local minima should have an
average value of zero.
The EMD algorithm can be summarized as follows: The signal x(t) is
subjected to determine all the possible extrema. Lower and upper en­
velopes Xmin (t) and Xmax (t) are obtained through the interpolation be­
tween minima and respective maxima. The mean value a(t) of the
envelopes is determined as follows:
a(t) = (Xmin (t) + Xmax (t))/2
which is further subtracted from the signal x(t) to obtain d(t) as follows:
d(t) = x(t) − a(t)
Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 71 (2022) 103098
It must be examined that d(t) is fulfilling the criterion to be an IMF or
not. If not then repeat the process till it satisfies the IMF criterion. After
extracting the first IMF, it is subtracted from the x(t) to obtain the re­
sidual r(t) as follows:
r(t) = x(t) − d(t) (3)
This process needs to be repeated till the extraction of all the IMFs
from the residuals.
The IMF1(t), IMF2(t),..., IMFN(t) are the different frequency compo­
nents of x(t) which are in the decreasing order of the frequency. The
residual part is used to represents the central tendency of a signal x(t).
The original signal x(t) can be reconstructed by adding all IMFs and
residual r(t). The decomposed IMFs for normal, myopathy, and ALS EMG
signals are shown in Figs. 3–5, respectively. It should be noted that the
(1)
IMFs shown in Figs. 3–5 are obtained from normal, ALS, and myopathy
EMG signals shown in Fig. 2.
In this work, we have extracted the features from the complex plane
(2) plot of the third IMF of EMG signal for the classification purpose. The
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R. Dubey et al. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 71 (2022) 103098

Fig. 4. Plots of IMFs of ALS EMG signals (a) IMF1(t) (b) IMF2(t) (c) IMF3(t) (d) IMF4(t) (e) IMF5(t) (f) IMF6(t) (g) IMF7(t) (h) IMF8(t) (i) IMF9(t) (j) IMF10(t).

Fig. 5. Plots of IMFs of myopathy EMG signals (a) IMF1(t) (b) IMF2(t) (c) IMF3(t) (d) IMF4(t) (e) IMF5(t) (f) IMF6(t) (g) IMF7(t) (h) IMF8(t) (i) IMF9(t) (j) IMF10(t).

IMF selection criteria is discussed in the subsection 2.3.

2.3. IMF selection criteria

Fig. 6. Histogram of first priority selected IMF.
In the proposed methodology, we have selected the third IMF for the
feature computation. The IMF is selected using the t-test based approach
for measuring the statistical significance [34].
In t-test, the h-value and p-value are computed to check the statis­
tical significance that the data is normally distributed or not. For sta­
tistical significance, the p-value equal to 0.05 is considered as a
threshold value [34]. If the p-value of the IMF is greater than the
threshold value (h-value is equal to 0) than the IMF is considered as
statistical significant. Otherwise, the IMF is not normally distributed (h-
value is equal to 1). We have computed the p-values and h-values for
every IMF. The IMFs are ranked from the high to low p-values of IMF
[35]. It is recommended in [34] to select the IMFs with high p-values in
order to create a feature set with improved classification performance.

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Fig. 7. Complex plane plot of the third IMFs of (a) Normal EMG signal, (b) ALS EMG signal, and (c) myopathy EMG signal.

Fig. 6 shows the histogram plot of IMF number against the occurrence of
A = Area of Δ(ABC) + Area of Δ(ADC) (8)
high p-values. It can be observed from the Fig. 6 that the occurrence of
the highest p-value is maximum for the third IMF. ( ) √̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅
Hence, the complex plane plot of the third IMF is used for feature Area of Δ ABC = s1 (s1 − AB)(s1 − BC)(s1 − fp1 ) (9)
computation in the presented work. In this work, the HT is used for ( ) √̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅
analytic signal representation of the third IMF. The HT and computation Area of Δ ADC = s2 (s2 − AD)(s2 − DC)(s2 − fp2 ) (10)
of the features from the complex plane plot are explained in the next
subsection.
CF = D1 + D2 + D3 + D4 (11)

2.4. Hilbert transform and feature computation where D1 , D2 , D3 , D4 are

√̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅
The analytic representation of the signal has been computed by the D1 = (x2 − x1 )2 + (y2 − y1 )2 (12)
HT. The HT is basically used to obtain the complex plane plot of signals.
In this work, we have used IMF3(t) to generate the analytic signal √̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅
IMF3a(t) as follows: D2 = (x3 − x2 )2 + (y3 − y2 )2 (13)
() () √̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅
IMF3a t = IMF3 t + j IMF ̂ 3 (t) (4)
D3 = (x4 − x3 )2 + (y4 − y3 )2 (14)

In above Eq. (4), IMF

̂ 3 (t) is the HT of IMF3(t) as follows:
()
1
̂
IMF3 (t) = IMF3 t ⊛ (5)
πt
where ⊛ is the convolution operator. The complex plane plot obtained
from the third IMF of normal, myopathy, and ALS EMG signals are
shown in Fig. 7(a)–(c), respectively. Further, the foot distance is
computed from the complex plane plot of the analytic signal obtained
from the third IMF.
The foot distances are denoted as fp1 and fp2 , respectively. The
farthest points from the imaginary axis (Im) in the complex plane plot
are marked as (x2 , y2 ) and (x4 , y4 ). The distance between these two
points in the complex plane is fp1 which is computed as follows:
√̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅
fp1 = (x2 − x4 )2 + (y2 − y4 )2 (6)
Similarly, the farthest points from the real axis (Re) in the complex
plane is marked as (x3 ,y3 ), and (x1 ,y1 ). The distance between these two
points in the complex plane is fp2 , which is computed as follows:
√̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅
fp2 = ((x3 − x1 )2 + (y3 − y1 )2 (7)
In Fig. 7, the fp1 and fp2 are foot-distances, those are considered as
the diagonals of quadrilateral which are denoted as dotted lines in Fig. 7.
Further, the A and CF of the quadrilateral are computed as follows:
√̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅
D4 = (x1 − x4 )2 + (y1 − y4 )2 (15)
Finally, the feature set, consists of A and CF of EMG signals are fed to
the various classifiers. The description of studied classifier is given in the
Section 2.5.
2.5. Classification algorithm
In this work, the classification of the EMG signals is performed using
three different classifiers named as feed forward neural network, sup­
port vector machine (SVM), and decision tree.
2.5.1. Feed forward neural network
Feed forward neural network (FFNN) is trained in order to associate
the outputs with the input patterns [36]. When the trained network is
subjected to an input, it attempts to find the associate output pattern
which is least different from the given pattern [37]. FFNN is used in
various fields, including detection of hand gesture through surface EMG
signals [38].
2.5.2. Support vector machine
SVM [39] is a set of supervised learning method used for classifica­
tion. SVM is capable of classifying the objects into binary as well as
multi-class classification on a dataset. It is a discriminative classifier
formally defined by a separating hyperplane. The SVM is widely used for

5
R. Dubey et al.
Table 1
Mean and standard deviation of computed features.
Type of EMG Signal Mean ± SD (Features)
CF A
Normal EMG Signal 0.0057 ± 1.45 × 10− 4 2.2074 ± 0.1842
Myopathy EMG Signal 0.0034 ± 2.83 × 10− 4 0.7497 ± 0.1361
ALS EMG Signal 0.0160 ± 0.0021 9.5986 ± 0.2227
classification purpose [40,41].
2.5.3. Decision tree
Decision tree analysis is a modeling tool utilized in numerous
research fields [42]. Dataset is divided into subsets using various algo­
rithmic approaches in decision trees. The Decision tree is the most
commonly used non-parametric supervised learning scheme by which
both classification and regression tasks can be done [42].
3. Results
In the proposed methodology, EMG signals are decomposed using
EMD into IMFs. The third IMF is selected based on t-test statistics for the
feature computation in the proposed work. In this work, the analytic
signal of the third IMF is used to compute the features.
The proposed methodology is tested on a dataset which consists of
more than 900 EMG signals of three classes. The data set used in the
proposed methodology has almost similar number of signals in each
class. Hence, the distribution of samples in each class is fair. The mean
and standard deviation (SD) of the proposed features for the three
studied classes are shown in Table 1. It can be observed from the Table 1,
the ranges of the features (mean and SD) of the different classes are
found to be significantly different. Moreover, we have also performed a
post hoc test [43] to examine the statistical significance of the features.
The obtained p-values of the proposed features are found to be zero
which is below the threshold value 0.05. It also indicates the high
discrimination ability of the proposed features A and CF.
To perform the experiment, the dataset is divided into three parts i.e
Fig. 8. Validation performance of FFNN used for classification.
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Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 71 (2022) 103098
training, validation, and test. Validation and test datasets are each set to
15% of the entire dataset. The remaining dataset is used for the training.
In this work, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity are selected as the
performance evaluation parameters of the classifiers. These parameters
depend on the true-positive (TP) rate, true-negative (TN) rate, false-
positive (FP) rate, and false-negative (FN) rate [44]. The accuracy of
classification is the ratio of a total number of two correct predictions (TP
+ TN) to the total number of predictions. Sensitivity is also called recall;
it is the ratio of the number of correct positive predictions (TP) to the
total number of positive predictions (TP + FN). Specificity is computed
as the ratio of the number of correct negative predictions (TN) to the
total number of negative predictions (TN + FP).
The set of A and CF computed from the EMG signals are fed to the
different classifiers namely FFNN, SVM, and decision tree. FFNN is used
with 10 neurons in the hidden layer with hyperbolic tangent sigmoid as
an activation function. The proposed method, when tested with FFNN
achieved a maximum classification accuracy of 99.53%. Cross entropy is
used as a validation performance parameter for the FFNN. The target
value of the Cross entropy for the best performance is set at 4.0818e− 07.
The best training, validation, and test performance of the FFNN are
achieved at 17 epochs as shown in Fig. 8. SVM is used with a Gaussian
kernel in the experiment and proposed method achieved a classification
accuracy of 99.10%. Decision tree with 5 numbers of nodes has been
used in the experiment for classification purpose, and achieved a clas­
sification accuracy of 99.10%. The comparative analysis of the various
classifiers for performance parameters are shown in Table 2. It can be
observed from the Table 2 that the performance of the proposed meth­
odology is best when the features are fed to the FFNN. Hence, further
Table 2
Comparison between overall performances of various classifiers.
Classifier Performance Parameter
Accuracy (%) Sensitivity (%) Specificity (%)
FFNN 99.53 99.25 99.60
SVM 99.10 99.07 99.53
Decision Tree 99.10 99.07 99.53
R. Dubey et al. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 71 (2022) 103098

Table 3 analysis (LDA) and a majority voting scheme in [45]. This method
Performance evaluation parameters for FFNN classifier. yielded 98% classification accuracy for three classes. In [46], the nine
Parameter ALS Myopathy Normal Overall(%) time-domain and three time–frequency domain-based features are uti­
lized for the study of EMG signals. In [46], the performance of proposed
Accuracy (%) 99.30 100 99.30 99.53
Sensitivity (%) 97.77 100 100 99.25 features is tested with six classifiers. The maximum average accuracy of
Specificity (%) 100 100 98.80 99.60 classification is 97% for three classes using SVM based boundary dataset
classifier with nearest neighbor boundaries. In [17], the time–frequency
(TF) based features are computed. The energy contained in TF matrix is
analysis is performed using the FFNN. sliced into ten segments with equal energy levels. The authors computed
The classwise performance of the proposed methodology in terms of the energy contained in each slice for all the MUAPs of each class. The
accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity for FFNN on test dataset is shown in authors confirmed that the percentile-based features performed better
the Table 3. than the other computed features and achieved a maximum classifica­
Further, the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) is computed to tion accuracy of 96.7%. In our proposed work, the study is conducted on
investigate the evaluation performance of the classifiers. The ROC curve the full dataset of the EMG signals [31,32]. Our proposed methodology
[44] is shown in Fig. 9. This plot consists of subplots which are training, has obtained 99.53% classification accuracy, using only two features.
test, validation, and overall ROC. It is plotted between TP and FP. Hence, our methodology performs better as compared to the other
Confusion matrix is a matrix between the output class (OC) and target exiting methodologies. The comparison of the proposed method with the
class (TC). In Fig. 10, the confusion matrix indicate the classification of existing methods is shown in Table 4.
EMG signals into three classes namely, ALS, myopathy, and normal. The Moreover, the features in the proposed methodology can also be used
four confusion matrix are corresponding to the training, test, validation, as a visual indicator for the identification of neuromuscular disorders.
and overall dataset.
5. Conclusion
4. Discussion
A new method for EMG signals classification and detection of
The proposed methodology and other exiting methodologies are neuromuscular disorder is explored in this paper. The complex plane
compared in Table 4. In [45], the methodology is tested on 250 EMG plots obtained from the analytic signal of the third IMF are used to
signals which contain 150 normal, 50 ALS, and 50 myopathy EMG sig­ extract the features. The complex plots of the analytic signals of third
nals. The five time-domain features are fed to the linear discriminant

Fig. 9. ROC of a FFNN for (a) Training (b) Validation (c) Test (d) overall.

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R. Dubey et al. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 71 (2022) 103098

Fig. 10. Confusion matrix from the FFNN classifier for (a) Training (b) Validation (c) Test (d) overall.

the surface EMG signals. In our future work, we also plan to explore the
Table 4 proposed work on the surface EMG signals. This algorithm could also be
Comparison of the proposed method with the existing methods. tested for musculoskeletal disorder to assess its applicability in patho­
Authors Year Method No of Accuracy logical conditions. It is recommended that the proposed algorithm must
Features (%) be evaluated on EMG signals collected from the larger number of sub­
Naik et al. [45] 2015 EEMD-ICA 5 98 jects before its implementation in clinics and hospitals.
Kamaliet al. 2013 Multi-Classifier 12 97
[46]
Sharma et al. 2020 EVD based TF 96.7 Declaration of Competing Interest
[17] Representation
Proposed EMD and Complex 2 99.53
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
Method Plane Plot
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
IMFs have shown better visual discrimination between the normal,
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