Decoding the neural drive to muscles from the surface electromyogram.

By Dario Farina, Ales Holobar, Roberto Merletti, Roger M. Enoka. Clinical Neurophysiology, 2010

356 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This brief review discusses the methods used to estimate the neural drive to muscles from the surface electromyogram (EMG). Surface EMG has been classically used to infer the neural activation of muscle by associating its amplitude with the number of action potentials discharged by a population of motor neurons. Although this approach is valuable in some applications, the amplitude of the surface EMG is only a crude indicator of the neural drive to muscle. More advanced methods are now available to estimate the neural drive to muscle from the surface EMG. These approaches identify the discharge times of a few motor units by decomposing the EMG signal to determine the relative changes in neural activation. This approach is reliable in several conditions and muscles for isometric contractions of moderate force, but is limited to the few superficial units that can be identified in the recordings.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/34f5e1d8f6c26a441cb86946c9d052ae27828b56

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Citations in the corpus

Skeletal muscle performance and ageing (2017, neutral): “There are a number of methodological approaches to quantify voluntary activation, such as amplitude measures of the voluntary electromyogram signal (although caution should be taken with this approach 134,135 ) as well as by comparing voluntary and electrically stimulated muscle forces.”
Myoelectric Control of Artificial Limbs¿Is There a Need to Change Focus? [In the Spotlight] (2012, background): “Advanced signal processing of the electromyogram (EMG) signal and innovative surgical procedures, such as the targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR) and targeted sensory reinnervation (TSR), are the driving forces behind these achievements.”
The Extraction of Neural Information from the Surface EMG for the Control of Upper-Limb Prostheses: Emerging Avenues and Challenges (2014, methodology): “The surface EMG is obtained by convolution of each motor neuron spike train by the motor unit action potential [7], [21], [22]:”