Non-negative Tensor Factorization for Single-Channel EEG Artifact Rejection

International audienceNew applications of Electroencephalographic recording (EEG) pose new challenges in terms of artifact removal. In our work, we target informed source separation methods for artifact removal in single-channel EEG recordings by exploiting prior knowledge from auxiliary lightweight sensors capturing artifactual signals. To achieve this, we first propose a method using Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) in a Gaussian source separation that proves competitive against the classic multi-channel Independent Component Analysis (ICA) technique. Additionally, we confront a probabilistic Non-negative Tensor Factorization (NTF) with ICA, both used in an original scheme that jointly processes the EEG and auxiliary signals. The adopted NTF strategy is shown to improve separation accuracy in comparison with the usual multi-channel ICA approach and the single EEG channel NMF method

Review of Artifact Rejection Methods for Electroencephalographic Systems

Technologies using electroencephalographic (EEG) signals have been penetrated into public by the development of EEG systems. During EEG system operation, recordings ought to be obtained under no restriction of movement for routine use in the real world. However, the lack of consideration of situational behavior constraints will cause technical/biological artifacts that often mixed with EEG signals and make the signal processing difficult in all respects by ingeniously disguising themselves as EEG components. EEG systems integrating gold standard or specialized device in their processing strategies would appear as daily tools in the future if they are unperturbed to such obstructions. In this chapter, we describe algorithms for artifact rejection in multi-/single-channel. In particular, some existing single-channel artifact rejection methods that will exhibit beneficial information to improve their performance in online EEG systems were summarized by focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of algorithms

Muscle Activity Analysis using Higher-Order Tensor Decomposition: Application to Muscle Synergy Extraction

Higher-order tensor decompositions have hardly been used in muscle activity analysis despite multichannel electromyography (EMG) datasets naturally occurring as multi-way structures. Here, we seek to demonstrate and discuss the potential of tensor decompositions as a framework to estimate muscle synergies from $3^{rd}$-order EMG tensors built by stacking repetitions of multi-channel EMG for several tasks. We compare the two most widespread tensor decomposition models -- Parallel Factor Analysis (PARAFAC) and Tucker -- in muscle synergy analysis of the wrist's three main Degree of Freedoms (DoFs) using the public first Ninapro database. Furthermore, we proposed a constrained Tucker decomposition (consTD) method for efficient synergy extraction building on the power of tensor decompositions. This method is proposed as a direct novel approach for shared and task-specific synergy estimation from two biomechanically related tasks. Our approach is compared with the current standard approach of repetitively applying non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) to a series of movements. The results show that the consTD method is suitable for synergy extraction compared to PARAFAC and Tucker. Moreover, exploiting the multi-way structure of muscle activity, the proposed methods successfully identified shared and task-specific synergies for all three DoFs tensors. These were found to be robust to disarrangement with regard to task-repetition information, unlike the commonly used NMF. In summary, we demonstrate how to use tensors to characterise muscle activity and develop a new consTD method for muscle synergy extraction that could be used for shared and task-specific synergies identification. We expect that this study will pave the way for the development of novel muscle activity analysis methods based on higher-order techniques.Comment: Accepted February 5, 201

Nonlinear and factorization methods for the non-invasive investigation of the central nervous system

This thesis focuses on the functional study of the Central Nervous System (CNS) with non-invasive techniques. Two different aspects are investigated: nonlinear aspects of the cerebrovascular system, and the muscle synergies model for motor control strategies. The main objective is to propose novel protocols, post-processing procedures or indices to enhance the analysis of cerebrovascular system and human motion analysis with noninvasive devices or wearable sensors in clinics and rehabilitation. We investigated cerebrovascular system with Near-infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS), a technique measuring blood oxygenation at the level of microcirculation, whose modification reflects cerebrovascular response to neuronal activation. NIRS signal was analyzed with nonlinear methods, because some physiological systems, such as neurovascular coupling, are characterized by nonlinearity. We adopted Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) to decompose signal into a finite number of simple functions, called Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF). For each IMF, we computed entropy-based features to characterize signal complexity and variability. Nonlinear features of the cerebrovascular response were employed to characterize two treatments. Firstly, we administered a psychotherapy called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) to two groups of patients. The first group performed therapy with eye movements, the second without. NIRS analysis with EMD and entropy-based features revealed a different cerebrovascular pattern between the two groups, that may indicate the efficacy of the psychotherapy when administered with eye movements. Secondly, we administered ozone autohemotherapy to two groups of subjects: a control group of healthy subjects and a group of patients suffering by multiple sclerosis (MS). We monitored the microcirculation with NIRS from oxygen-ozone injection up 1.5 hours after therapy, and 24 hours after therapy. We observed that, after 1.5 hours after the ozonetherapy, oxygenation levels improved in both groups, that may indicate that ozonetherapy reduced oxidative stress level in MS patients. Furthermore, we observed that, after ozonetherapy, autoregulation improved in both groups, and that the beneficial effects of ozonetherapy persisted up to 24 hours after the treatment in MS patients. Due to the complexity of musculoskeletal system, CNS adopts strategies to efficiently control the execution of motor tasks. A model of motor control are muscle synergies, defined as functional groups of muscles recruited by a unique central command. Human locomotion was the object of investigation, due to its importance for daily life and the cyclicity of the movement. Firstly, by exploiting features provided from statistical gait analysis, we investigated consistency of muscle synergies. We demonstrated that synergies are highly repeatable within-subjects, reinforcing the hypothesis of modular control in motor performance. Secondly, in locomotion, we distinguish principal from secondary activations of electromyography. Principal activations are necessary for the generation of the movement. Secondary activations generate supplement movements, for instance slight balance correction. We investigated the difference in the motor control strategies underlying muscle synergies of principal (PS) and secondary (SS) activations. We found that PS are constituted by a few modules with many muscles each, whereas SS are described by more modules than PS with one or two muscles each. Furthermore, amplitude of activation signals of PS is higher than SS. Finally, muscle synergies were adopted to investigate the efficacy of rehabilitation of stiffed-leg walking in lower back pain (LBP). We recruited a group of patients suffering from non-specific LBP stiffening the leg at initial contact. Muscle synergies during gait were extracted before and after rehabilitation. Our results showed that muscles recruitment and consistency of synergies improved after the treatment, showing that the rehabilitation may affect motor control strategies

Higher-order tensor decompositions for muscle synergy analysis

This doctoral thesis outlines several methodological advances in the application of higher-order tensor decomposition for muscle synergy analysis estimated from surface Electromyogram (EMG). This entails both assessing current muscle synergy extraction methods and a novel direct approach to estimate useful muscle synergies using higher-order tensor decomposition. The underlying hypothesis is that higher-order tensor decompositions provide advantages in the estimation of temporal profiles and muscle synergies thanks to the consideration of other domains such as spectral, task or repetition information. Moreover, we implement these advances to inspect potential applications of tensor synergies in biomechanical analysis and myoelectric control. Firstly, we provide an overview of the current mathematical models for the concept of muscle synergies and compare the common matrix factorisation methods for muscle synergy extraction, in addition to second-order blind identification (SOBI), a technique which has not been used for muscle synergy estimation previously. Synthetic and real EMG datasets related to wrist movements from the publicly available Ninapro dataset were used in this evaluation. Results suggest that a sparse synergy model and a higher number of channels would result in better-estimated synergies. SOBI has better performance when a limited number of electrodes is available, but its performance is still poor in that case. Overall, non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) is the most appropriate method for synergy extraction and, therefore, it is considered as a benchmark in the rest of the thesis. We then show the benefits of higher-order tensor decompositions of EMG data for muscle synergy analysis, discussing possible 3rd and 4th-order tensors models for EMG data. We explore muscle synergy estimation from 4th-order EMG tensors by taking the spectral profile into account and utilise this model for classification between the wrist’s movements in comparison with NMF. The results provide a proof-of-concept for higher-order tensor decomposition as classification accuracy is slightly improved using tensor decomposition over NMF. However, the addition of spectral mode -with time-frequency analysis- increases the computational cost for tensor synergy estimation. After the previous proof of concept, we focus on the 3rd -order tensor model for efficient and reliable extraction of meaningful muscle synergies. The most prominent tensor decomposition models (Tucker and PARAFAC) are compared under different constraints. We notice that unconstrained Tucker decomposition cannot extract unique and consistent muscle synergies as it converges into different local minima, while PARAFAC model cannot deal with a higher number of synergies or tasks as the decomposition deviates from the trilinear model. As a result, we introduce a constrained Tucker decomposition model as a framework for muscle synergy analysis. The advantages of this method over NMF are highlighted in the biomechanical application of identifying shared and task-specific muscle synergies. This benefits from the natural multi-way form of the EMG data, which makes higher-order tensor decompositions a better option than applying matrix factorisation repetitively. The constrained Tucker decomposition can successfully identify shared and task-specific synergies and is robust to disarrangement regarding task-repetition information, unlike NMF. The constrained Tucker model is then used as a framework to extract synergistic information that could be applied to proportional upper limb myoelectric control. The consistency of extracted muscle synergies with the increase of the wrist’s task dimensionality into 3 degrees of freedom (DoF) is investigated in comparison with NMF. In the literature, NMF approaches for synergy-based proportional myoelectric control were viable only with a task dimension of 2 DoF. In contrast, the results show that a constrained Tucker model identifies consistent muscle synergies from 3-DoFs dataset directly. Moreover, a tensor-based approach for proportional myoelectric control is introduced and compared against NMF and sparse NMF as state of the art benchmarks. To sum up, higher-order tensor decomposition had not been utilised in EMG analysis despite the substantial attention it received in biomedical signal processing applications in recent years. This thesis explores higher-order tensor decompositions for synergy extraction to account for the natural multi-way structure of EMG data. We hope that it will pave the way for the development of muscle activity analysis methods based on higher-order techniques in broader applications

比例筋電位制御に向けた筋シナジーの抽出、解釈、および応用の研究

Transfer of human intentions into myoelectric hand prostheses is generally achieved by learning a mapping, directly from sEMG signals to the Kinematics using linear or nonlinear regression approaches. Due to the highly random and nonlinear nature of sEMG signals such approaches are not able to exploit the functions of the modern pros- thesis, completely. Inspired from the muscle synergy hypothesis in the motor control community, some studies in the past have shown that better estimation accuracies can be achieved by learning a mapping to kinematics space from the synergistic features extracted from sEMG. However, mainly linear algorithms such as Principle Compo- nent Analysis (PCA), and Non-negative matrix factorization (NNMF) were employed to extract synergistic features, separately, from EMG and kinematics data and have not considered the nonlinearity and the strong correlation that exist between finger kine- matics and muscles. To exploit the relationship between EMG and Finger Kinematics for myoelectric control, we propose the use of the Manifold Relevance Determination (MRD) model (multi-view learning) to find the correspondence between muscular and kinematics by learning a shared low-dimensional representation. In the first part of the study, we present the approach of multi-view learning, interpretation of extracted non- linear muscle synergies from the joint study of sEMG and finger kinematics and their use in estimating the finger kinematics for the upper-limb prosthesis. Applicability of the proposed approach is then demonstrated by comparing the kinematics estimation accuracies against linear synergies and direct mapping. In the second part of the study, we propose a new approach to extract nonlinear muscle synergies from sEMG using multiview learning which addresses the two main drawbacks (1. Inconsistent synergistic patterns upon addition of sEMG signals from more muscles, 2. Weak metric for accessing the quality and quantity of muscle synergies) of established algorithms and discuss the potential of the proposed approach for reducing the number of electrodes with negligible degradation in predicted kinematics.九州工業大学博士学位論文 学位記番号：生工博甲第372号 学位授与年月日：令和2年3月25日1 Introduction|2 Related Work|3 Extraction of nonlinear synergies for proportional and simultaneous estimation of finger kinematics|4 An Approach to Extract Nonlinear Muscle Synergies from sEMG through Multi-Model Learning|5 Conclusion and Future Work九州工業大学令和元年

On the Utility of Representation Learning Algorithms for Myoelectric Interfacing

Electrical activity produced by muscles during voluntary movement is a reflection of the firing patterns of relevant motor neurons and, by extension, the latent motor intent driving the movement. Once transduced via electromyography (EMG) and converted into digital form, this activity can be processed to provide an estimate of the original motor intent and is as such a feasible basis for non-invasive efferent neural interfacing. EMG-based motor intent decoding has so far received the most attention in the field of upper-limb prosthetics, where alternative means of interfacing are scarce and the utility of better control apparent. Whereas myoelectric prostheses have been available since the 1960s, available EMG control interfaces still lag behind the mechanical capabilities of the artificial limbs they are intended to steer—a gap at least partially due to limitations in current methods for translating EMG into appropriate motion commands. As the relationship between EMG signals and concurrent effector kinematics is highly non-linear and apparently stochastic, finding ways to accurately extract and combine relevant information from across electrode sites is still an active area of inquiry.This dissertation comprises an introduction and eight papers that explore issues afflicting the status quo of myoelectric decoding and possible solutions, all related through their use of learning algorithms and deep Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models. Paper I presents a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for multi-label movement decoding of high-density surface EMG (HD-sEMG) signals. Inspired by the successful use of CNNs in Paper I and the work of others, Paper II presents a method for automatic design of CNN architectures for use in myocontrol. Paper III introduces an ANN architecture with an appertaining training framework from which simultaneous and proportional control emerges. Paper Iv introduce a dataset of HD-sEMG signals for use with learning algorithms. Paper v applies a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model to decode finger forces from intramuscular EMG. Paper vI introduces a Transformer model for myoelectric interfacing that do not need additional training data to function with previously unseen users. Paper vII compares the performance of a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network to that of classical pattern recognition algorithms. Lastly, paper vIII describes a framework for synthesizing EMG from multi-articulate gestures intended to reduce training burden