Multiscale entropy-based approach to automated surface EMG classification of neuromuscular disorders

We introduce a novel method for an automatic classification of subjects to those with or without neuromuscular disorders. This method is based on multiscale entropy of recorded surface electromyograms (sEMGs) and support vector classification. The method was evaluated on a single-channel experimental sEMGs recorded from biceps brachii muscle of nine healthy subjects, nine subjects with muscular and nine subjects with neuronal disorders, at 10%, 30%, 50%, 70% and 100% of maximal voluntary contraction force. Leave-one-out cross-validation was performed, deploying binary (healthy/patient) and three-class classification (healthy/myopathic/neuropathic). In the case of binary classification, subjects were distinguished with 81.5% accuracy (77.8% sensitivity at 83.3% specificity). At three-class classification, the accuracy decreased to 70.4% (myopathies were recognized with a sensitivity of 55.6% at specificity 88.9%, neuropathies with a sensitivity of 66.7% at specificity 83.3%). The proposed method is suitable for fast and non-invasive discrimination of healthy and neuromuscular patient groups, but it fails to recognize the type of pathology.