Detection and Reconstruction of Poor-Quality Channels in High-Density EMG Array Measurements

High-density electromyography (HD-EMG) arrays allow for the study of muscle activity in both time and space by recording electrical potentials produced by muscle contractions. HD-EMG array measurements are susceptible to noise and artifacts and frequently contain some poor-quality channels. This paper proposes an interpolation-based method for the detection and reconstruction of poor-quality channels in HD-EMG arrays. The proposed detection method identified artificially contaminated channels of HD-EMG for signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels 0 dB and lower with ≥99.9% precision and ≥97.6% recall. The interpolation-based detection method had the best overall performance compared with two other rule-based methods that used the root mean square (RMS) and normalized mutual information (NMI) to detect poor-quality channels in HD-EMG data. Unlike other detection methods, the interpolation-based method evaluated channel quality in a localized context in the HD-EMG array. For a single poor-quality channel with an SNR of 0 dB, the F1 scores for the interpolation-based, RMS, and NMI methods were 99.1%, 39.7%, and 75.9%, respectively. The interpolation-based method was also the most effective detection method for identifying poor channels in samples of real HD-EMG data. F1 scores for the detection of poor-quality channels in real data for the interpolation-based, RMS, and NMI methods were 96.4%, 64.5%, and 50.0%, respectively. Following the detection of poor-quality channels, 2D spline interpolation was used to successfully reconstruct these channels. Reconstruction of known target channels had a percent residual difference (PRD) of 15.5 ± 12.1%. The proposed interpolation-based method is an effective approach for the detection and reconstruction of poor-quality channels in HD-EMG.