2010 International Conference on Advances in Recent Technologies in Communication and Computing

Automated detection of PD resting tremor using PSD

with recurrent neural network classifier
a,b

R Arvind, a,bB Karthik, b*N Sriraam and cJ Kamala Kannan

a,b

Undergraduate Student, Biomedical Engineering,SSN College of Engineering,Chennai

Center for Biomedical Informatics and Signal Processing, Dept of Bio- Medical Engineering,
SSN College of Engineering, Chennai, India
c
Neurology Dept,Sri Ramachandra University,Chennai,India
*sriraamn@ssn.edu.in

Abstract Diagnosis of Parkinsons disease (PD) is a challenging

problem for medical community. Typically characterized by
tremor, PD occurs due to the loss of dopamine in the brains
thalamic region that results in involuntary or oscillatory
movement in the body. The early stage of the PD is referred as
resting tremors, which appears when the muscles are relaxed. It
is well known that surface EMG recording provides clinical
information on the neuro-physiological characteristics of the
tremors. This paper discusses the detection of resting tremors by
extracting power spectral density (PSD) features from EMGs.
Two methods namely, PSD by Welch and Burgs are applied by
configuring the order of the predictors and are then classified
using a recurrent neural network model, Elman Neural Network
(REN). Experiments are performed using EMG patterns and
statistical measures such as mean and maximum of PSD are used
to classify the normal and abnormal PD subjects. It is found
from the experimental results that the mean value of power
spectral density by Burg with recurrent neural network classifier
yields a classification accuracy of 95.6%. The proposed work
need to be validated with larger datasets for real -time clinical
application.
Keywords Parkinsons Disease; EMG tremors; power spectral
density; recurrent neural network

properly, provided appropriate features are extracted. Time

and frequency domain features such as frequency spectrum
estimation, amplitude and the frequency band in which
maximum signal contribution have already been reported [613]. In this research study the importance of power spectral
information is investigated by using two methods, namely,
PSD by Welch and PSD by Burgs. Fig.1 shows the proposed
schematic for detection of PD. The optimal features based on
statistical means are then classified using Recurrent Neural
network model, Elman network. Then the classifier accuracy
is estimated based on the network performance in recognizing
the true-false positive and negative patterns respectively.

I. INTRODUCTION
Electromyography (EMG), the measure of electrical
activity produced by skeletal muscles, is one of the major
diagnostic parameter for detection of Parkinsons disease (PD)
[1-3] . The brain is the master controller of the body activities
and that includes the motor activities as well. The
degeneration of the hypothalamus in the brain leads to very
severe complications of which Parkinson's disease(PD) is the
most widespread. PD is characterized by muscle rigidity,
resting muscular tremor that is very rare for normal subjects, a
slowing of motor action (bradykinesia) and a loss of muscular
contraction that leads to loss of the entire motor activity
(akinesia)[2-4] in extreme cases. Reduced motor activity in
this disease makes it detectable with the help of EMG
measurements from the patient.
The early indication of the PD is the resting tremor with a
trembling or shaking in one of the hands. This is due to the
involuntary action of the muscles. This muscle activation is
well exploited by investigating the EMGs and several work
have been reported in the literature for the diagnosis of PD [613]. The alternating properties of the EMG can be exploited

II. MATERIALS AND METHODS

978-0-7695-4201-0/10 $26.00 2010 IEEE

DOI 10.1109/ARTCom.2010.33

EMG
SIGNALS

PREPROCESS
ING

FEATURE
SELECTION
BASED ON PSD
WELCH / PSD

RECURRENT
NEURAL
NETWORK
CLASSIFIER

NOR
MAL
PD

Fig.1 Proposed work for the detection of PD

A. Data Source
For experimental study, EMGs are obtained from the
Neurology Department, Sri Ramachandra University, Chennai,
India. The subjects under the age group of 20-30 years are
selected and recorded under rest and activated motion from
the extensor carpi radialis muscle. Resting tremors are
recorded from subjects diagnosed by physicians as PD and
induced muscular contractions are recorded from normal
subjects. All the EMG data are free from artifacts and external
power line interference. The EMG recordings are considered
for a restricted duration of 30 min with sampling frequency of
100 Hz. Fig.2 shows the sample recordings.
B. Feature Extraction
In order to characterize the tremor accurately, the entire
EMG time series is segmented into 1s, say patterns.
Furthermore this ensures stationarity of the signal and
frequency domain parameters can be extracted subsequently.
The PSD of the EMG signal is evaluated through
autoregressive Burgs method and Welch method [14-16].
414

1)

PSD using AR Burg:

reduce the variances of individual power estimates. This result

is called the Welch estimate. The repetitive information in the
output due to the overlapping of the input signals can be
minimized by using a non-rectangular window for further
processing. The window must be chosen in accordance with
the requirement that it reduces the weights allotted to the
segment exteriors than to the center.

The fundamental method to estimate the distribution of

power density across the frequency bands is the Burg
method which calculates the PSD by estimating the
reflection co-efficients. The major errors that might arise
during the evaluation of PSD with this method is the
prediction errors. The prediction errors may be forward or
backward prediction errors. The application of
autoregressive model reduces these errors, while reducing
the number of AR parameters to be in accordance with the
Levinson-Durbin recursion and producing an optimal
combination of both these errors. The input is the sampled
EMG data sampled at 1s duration.

(2)
III. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
All To detect the PD from the given EMG time series, neural
network model is incorporated. A feedback Elman neural
network (REN) model is used for the classification. In order to
evaluate the statistical importance of the proposed power
spectral density features, the predictor order for Welch and
Burgs method are varied and mean as well as maximum
value of PSD for each segment(1s duration) is calculated. This
process will provide the abrupt variations of EMGs for the
abnormal cases. The performance of the proposed scheme is
evaluated in terms of sensitivity(SE) , specificity (SP) and
classification accuracy (CA).

normal EMG

Amplitude(mv)

2000

1000

-1000

2000

4000

6000

8000
10000
Time(sec)
PD EMG

12000

14000

16000

2000

4000

6000

8000
10000
Time(sec)

12000

14000

16000

Amplitude(mv)

100

-100

-200

(3)

Fig.2 Raw Data Plot for Normal and Abnormal subjects

(4)

The output is the estimate of the signal's power spectral

density calculated at the signals sampling frequency Fs.

(5)
where the True Positives refers to correctly detected normal
EMG patterns and True Negative refers to correctly detected
PDs.

(1)
The burg spectrum is advantageous as it always produces a
stable model with a satisfactory contribution in reducing the
prediction errors.

Input layer

Welch Method:
It is an improved method of estimating the PSD [1416]. This method is carried out with the sampled EMG data
with a quantified amount of overlap between the consecutive
segments. The input is divided into N segments each
containing X samples overlapping by a fixed number of
points. If the overlap is equal to X/ 2, then it is 50% overlap, if
the value of X is 0 then there is no overlapping between the
input data segments.
This method divides the data into eight segments by
default with a maximum of 50% overlap between them and
uses a Hamming window. Normally the windowing function
affects the computation of the peridogram at the centre of the
segment than at the edges, which results in a loss of
information. To avoid this loss of information, overlapping of
the segments is carried out. Discrete Fourier transform is
applied to compute the periodogram of each segment. Then
the estimated periodogram is time-averaged, in order to

Hidden layers

O utput layer

2)

P SD based
Features

Norm al /PD

Context Units

Recurrent Links

Fig.3 Architecture of Elman neural network

Due to the presence of feedback connections in Elman
network from the output to the context nodes, the robust
changes in values are reflected and a high accuracy of

415

classification can be possibly achieved. Fig.3 shows the model

of recurrent Elman neural network [17 ]. The network is
configured optimally with hidden neurons =60, tan sigmoid
and log sigmoid activation functions for input- hidden and
hidden-output layers respectively, back propogation
gradient descent momentum as learning algorithm. For
training the network, 2000 EMG patterns are used and 1200
for testing the efficiency of the network. Figs 4 and 5 show
the variation of PSD for normal and PD EMGs.

TABLE I
CLASSIFICATION RESULTS FOR WELCH USING ELMAN NETWORK

Order of predictor

PSD-Welch(mean)

x 10

1.5

SE

SP

CA
(%)

SE

SP

CA
(%)

P=2

52

112

86.33

52

112

86.3

P=5

46

69

90.41

102

225

71.9

Order of
Predictor

0.5

100

200

300

400
500
600
normal EMG patterns

700

800

900

PSD Burg(mean)

PSD
Burg(max)

1000

SE

SP

CA (%)

SE

SP

CA (%)

P=2

58

233

81.81

177

325

68.63

P=5

18

34

95.66

66

126

84

2000
PSD-Welch(mean)

PSD Welch(max)

TABLE II
CLASSIFICATION RESULTS FOR BURG USING ELMAN NETWORK

PSD
Welch(mean)

1500
1000
500
0

100

200

300

400
500
600
PD-EMG patterns

700

800

900

1000

Fig. 4 Variation of PSD (mean) using Welch Algorithm

1

x 10

PSD-Welch(mean)
PSD-Welch(max)

0.8
0.7

100

200

300

400
500
600
normal EMG patterns

700

800

900

Elman network output

PSD-Welch(max)

0.9

1000

PSD-Welch(max)

5000

0.6
0.5
0.4

4000

0.3

3000

0.2

2000

0.1

1000
0

0
0

100

200

300

400
500
600
PD-EMG patterns

700

800

900

1000

200

400

600
800
EMG TEST Patterns

1000

1200

Fig.6 Classifier performance using PSD-Welch with Elman

Fig. 5 Variation of PSD (max) using Welch Algorithm

Neural network

Table 1 shows the classifier output using the Elman neural

network. The number of misclassified patterns out of 600
applied patterns are shown.
It can be seen from Table 1 that the classifier performance
varies based on the order of the predictor as well as type of
PSD estimation algorithm. Amongst the different modes,
PSD- Burg (mean) yields the CA of 95.66%. Fig. 6 shows the
classifier results obtained using PSD-Welch with REN
classifier.

IV. CONCLUSIONS
This paper discusses the automated detection of resting
tremor characterizing Parkinson disease using power spectral
density features with recurrent Elman neural network. The
muscular activations were studied using the EMG recordings
and mean and maximum of power spectral densities were
estimated based on the Welch and Burgs algorithms. It can be
seen from the experimental results that the proposed scheme

416

yields promising classification results. To validate the

efficiency for clinical usage, attempts are being made to test
with lager datasets.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The research results presented here are based on data
obtained from the Neurology Department, Sri Ramachandra
University, Chennai, India.
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