Techniques of EMG signal analysis: detection, processing, classification and applications

Electromyography (EMG) signals can be used for clinical/biomedical applications, Evolvable Hardware Chip (EHW) development, and modern human computer interaction. EMG signals acquired from muscles require advanced methods for detection, decomposition, processing, and classification. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the various methodologies and algorithms for EMG signal analysis to provide efficient and effective ways of understanding the signal and its nature. We further point up some of the hardware implementations using EMG focusing on applications related to prosthetic hand control, grasp recognition, and human computer interaction. A comparison study is also given to show performance of various EMG signal analysis methods. This paper provides researchers a good understanding of EMG signal and its analysis procedures. This knowledge will help them develop more powerful, flexible, and efficient applications

Advanced robust non-invasive foetal heart detection techniques during active labour using one pair of transabdominal electrodes

The thesis proposes and evaluates three state-of-the-art signal processing techniques to detect fetal heartbeats within each maternal cardiac cycle, during labour contractions, using only a pair of transabdominal electrodes. The first and second techniques are, namely, the structured third- order cumulant-slice-template matching and the bispectral-contours-template matching for fetal QRS identification, respectively. The third technique is based on the modified and appropriately weighted spectral multiple signal classification (MUSIC) with incorporated covariance matrix for uterine contraction noise-like interfering signals also contaminated with noise. Essentially, two modifications to the standard MUSIC have been developed in order to enhance the performance of the spectral estimator in our applied work. The first modification involves the introduction of an optimised weighting function to the segmented ECG covariance matrix, and is chiefly aimed at enhancing the fetal QRS major spectral peak which occurs at around 30 Hz against the mother QRS major spectral peak usually occurring around 17 Hz and all other noise contributions. Additional optional pseudo-bispectral enhancement to sharpen the maternal and fetal spectral peaks, in particular when the mother and fetal R-waves are temporally coincident, have been achieved. The second modification to the spectral MUSIC is the removal of the unjustified assumption that only white Gaussian noise is present and the incorporation of the actual measured labour uterine contraction covariance matrix in reconfigured subspace analysis. This inevitably leads to the generalised eigenvectors - eigenvalues decomposition modern signal processing. This is now coined the modified, interference incorporated pseudo-spectral MUSIC. The above mentioned first and second techniques are higher-order statistics-based (HOS) and hybrid involving both signal processing and NN classifiers. The third technique is second-order statistics-based (SOS). In all techniques, the removal of signal non-linearity with the aid of non-linear Volterra synthesisers plays a crucial part in the fetal detection integrity. Accurately assessed fetal heart classification rates as high as 95% have been achieved during labour, thus helping to provide non-invasive transparency to fetal intrapartum welfare. Performance analysis and evaluation processes involved more than 30 critical cases classified as “fetal under stress in labour” recorded in a London hospital database and used both transbadominal ECG electrodes and fetal scalp electrodes. The latter facilitates detection of the instantaneous fetal heart rate which is then used as the Reference Fetal Heart Rate in the assessment of the classification rate of each of the above mentioned techniques. It will be shown that the fetal heartbeats are completely masked by uterine activity and noise artefacts in all the recorded transabdominal maternal ECG signals. The fetal scalp electrode was, therefore, deemed necessary to provide the highest accurate measure of fetal heart functionality (from the hospital viewpoint), and in the assessment of the three non-invasive techniques presented in this thesis. The techniques may also be used during gestation and as early as 10 weeks

The Application of Adaptive Linear and N on-Linear Filters to Fringe Order Identification in White-Light Interferometry Systems

Conventional optical interferometry systems driven by highly coherent light sources have a very short unambiguous operating range, a direct consequence of the flatness of the interference fringes visibility profile at the output of the system. The range can be extended by using a white-light interferometer (WU), which is driven by a low-coherence source and produces a Gaussian visibility profile with a unique maximum in correspondence of the central fringe. Due to system and/or measurement noise, however, the position of the maximum (from which an accurate measurement of the measurand - displacement, temperature, pressure, flow, etc. - can be derived) is not easily detectable, and can lead to large measurement errors. This is especially true in a multiplexing scheme, where the source power is distributed evenly among various sensors, with a corresponding drop in the overall signal-to-noise ratio. The inclusion of a signal processing scheme at the receiver end is thus a necessity. As the fringe pattern at the output of a WLI system is basically a noisy sine wave amplitude modulated by a Gaussian envelope, it can be classified as a non-stationary, narrow-band, linear but non-Gaussian signa\. So far, no attempt has been made to apply digital filtering techniques, as understood in the signal processing community, to the output signal of a WLI system. This thesis constitutes a first step in that direction. Since the only measurable information given by the system is contained in the output signal, the system is modelled as a "black box" driven by the system and measurement noise processes and containing an unknown set of parameters. Standard least squares techniques can then be applied to estimate the parameters of the model, as is usually done in the field of system identification when only noisy output measurements are available. It is shown that identification of the model parameters is equivalent to finding a set of coefficients for an inverse filter which takes the WU signal at its input and delivers the unknown noise process at the output. The non-stationarity of the signal is accounted for by allowing for time variations of the model parameters; this justifies the use of adaptive filters with time-varying coefficients. A new central fringe identification scheme is proposed, based on a modification of the standard least mean square (LMS) adaptive filtering algorithm in combination with amplitude thresholding of the fringe pattern. The new scheme is shown to offer considerable improvement in the identification rate when tested against current schemes over comparable operating ranges, while retaining the computational simplicity and operational speed of the standard LMS. Its performance is also shown to be largely independent of the step-size parameter controlling the rate of convergence and tracking in the standard LMS, which is known to be the main obstacle for a successful application of the algorithm in a practical setting. The non-Gaussianity of the signal is explored and an attempt is made to apply higher-order statistics (HOS) algorithms to central fringe identification. The effectiveness of Gaussianity tests on pilot Gaussian data is seen to depend not only on the number and length of records available but, perhaps more importantly, on the bandwidth of the process. Violation of the stationarity assumption is shown to lead to mis-classification of a seemingly non-Gaussian signal into a Gaussian one, as the visibility profile may alter the distribution of the underlying sinusoid making it appear Gaussian, even when beam diffraction and wavefront aberrations combine to produce a nonGaussian profile. HOS-based adaptive algorithms may still be of some benefit, however, if processing is confined to that region of the fringe pattern where sufficient non-Gaussianity is allowed to develop. Non-linear adaptive filters based on the Volterra theories are finally applied to compensate for possible non-linearities introduced by mismatches in optical components, chromatic aberrations, and analogue-to-digital converters. It is shown that although a Volterra filter is able to reproduce the low-amplitude distortions of the fringe pattern better than a linear filter does, the identification rate does not improve. Reasons are given for such behaviour

Application of Higher-Order Statistics and Subspace-Based Techniques to the Analysis and Diagnosis of Electrocardiogram Signals

The first and main contribution of this research work is the higher-order statistics (HOS)-based non-linear analysis and subsequent diagnosis of abnormal electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, particularly myocardial ischaemia. In the time domain; the second-, third-, and the fourth-order cumulants have been used in the analysis. In the frequency domain; up to the tenth-order polyspectra have been exploited. This HOS-based analysis of normal and ischaemic electrocardiogram signals has led to the identification of certain key discriminant features for the two physiological states of the heart. These features are then fed to different backpropagation-based multiple layer perceptrons for classification. The second contribution is a proposed new methodology to discriminate patients with angina pectoris or with old myocardial infarction (MI) during the first 60 seconds of stress test (or in some cases using rest ECG). It is based on the pseudo-spectral Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) and has the potential of being highly sensitive diagnostic signal processing tool. The third contribution is the development of a novel higher-order statistics, high-resolution estimator for quadratically coupled frequencies based on subspace spectral estimation. Extensive studies of cumulants, bispectra and bicoherence-squared of normal and ischaemic ECG signals collected from MIT and ST-T European databases has enabled us to see key discriminant features in both the third- and fourth-order cumulant domains. In the frequency domain, the polyspectral study has been extended to the lOth-order poly spectra. By calculating one-dimensional polyspectrum slices using an algorithm developed by Zhou and Giannakis (1995) a considerable reduction in the CPU time has been achieved. Furthermore, Zhou’s algorithm has been further extended to estimate the polycoherency slices which are used to characterise non-linearities in normal and ischaemic ECG signals. An important finding in this thesis is the decrease of the order of non-linearity representing the electrocardiogram signals of ischaemic patients. This thesis also includes the results of a pilot study involving eighteen healthy subjects (MIT database) and confirmed that the ECG signal is non-Gaussian, cyclostationary and quasi periodic. Combined spectral and bispectral analysis of the signal revealed that there are unique harmonic characteristics for the P-wave, QRS complex and T-wave and other frequencies due to harmonic interactions. In this work three linear and one non-linear adaptive filtering/predictions techniques have been applied to noisy ECG signals and their respective performances appraised. It is shown that the Kalman filter gives the best mean-square error MSE error but its comparatively long execution time and problems arising from ill-conditioning of the state-error covariance matrix render it of limited use in ECG applications. It is also shown that the LMS-based quadratic and cubic Volterra filters are the most superior for the ECG signal prediction. For ECG classifications; three multi-layer perceptrons employing back-propagation and modified back-propagation algorithms, and using two sets from the higher-order most discriminant features as their inputs, have yielded fairly high classification rates

Tensor Decompositions for Signal Processing Applications From Two-way to Multiway Component Analysis

The widespread use of multi-sensor technology and the emergence of big datasets has highlighted the limitations of standard flat-view matrix models and the necessity to move towards more versatile data analysis tools. We show that higher-order tensors (i.e., multiway arrays) enable such a fundamental paradigm shift towards models that are essentially polynomial and whose uniqueness, unlike the matrix methods, is guaranteed under verymild and natural conditions. Benefiting fromthe power ofmultilinear algebra as theirmathematical backbone, data analysis techniques using tensor decompositions are shown to have great flexibility in the choice of constraints that match data properties, and to find more general latent components in the data than matrix-based methods. A comprehensive introduction to tensor decompositions is provided from a signal processing perspective, starting from the algebraic foundations, via basic Canonical Polyadic and Tucker models, through to advanced cause-effect and multi-view data analysis schemes. We show that tensor decompositions enable natural generalizations of some commonly used signal processing paradigms, such as canonical correlation and subspace techniques, signal separation, linear regression, feature extraction and classification. We also cover computational aspects, and point out how ideas from compressed sensing and scientific computing may be used for addressing the otherwise unmanageable storage and manipulation problems associated with big datasets. The concepts are supported by illustrative real world case studies illuminating the benefits of the tensor framework, as efficient and promising tools for modern signal processing, data analysis and machine learning applications; these benefits also extend to vector/matrix data through tensorization. Keywords: ICA, NMF, CPD, Tucker decomposition, HOSVD, tensor networks, Tensor Train