734 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL SYSTEMS AND REHABILITATION ENGINEERING, VOL. 24, NO.
7, JULY 2016
Single-Channel EMG Classification With
Ensemble-Empirical-Mode-Decomposition-Based
ICA for Diagnosing Neuromuscular Disorders
Ganesh R. Naik, Senior Member, IEEE, S. Easter Selvan, and Hung T. Nguyen, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—An accurate and computationally efficient quan-
titative analysis of electromyography (EMG) signals plays an
inevitable role in the diagnosis of neuromuscular disorders, pros-
thesis, and several related applications. Since it is often the case
that the measured signals are the mixtures of electric potentials
that emanate from surrounding muscles (sources), many EMG
signal processing approaches rely on linear source separation
techniques such as the independent component analysis (ICA).
Nevertheless, naive implementations of ICA algorithms do not
comply with the task of extracting the underlying sources from
a single-channel EMG measurement. In this respect, the present
work focuses on a classification method for neuromuscular dis-
orders that deals with the data recorded using a single-channel
EMG sensor. The ensemble empirical mode decomposition algo-
rithm decomposes the single-channel EMG signal into a set of
noise-canceled intrinsic mode functions, which in turn are sepa-
rated by the FastICA algorithm. A reduced set of five time domain
features extracted from the separated components are classified
using the linear discriminant analysis, and the classification results
are fine-tuned with a majority voting scheme. The performance
of the proposed method has been validated with a clinical EMG
database, which reports a higher classification accuracy (98%).
The outcome of this study encourages possible extension of this
approach to real settings to assist the clinicians in making correct
diagnosis of neuromuscular disorders.
Index Terms—Ensemble empirical mode decomposition, inde-
pendent component analysis, neuromuscular disorder, surface
electromyography.
I. INTRODUCTION
E LECTROMYOGRAPHY (EMG) is a technique for
recording and evaluating electrical activities produced
by skeletal muscles. The signals thus recorded known as
myoelectric or EMG signals are extensively used for clinical
diagnosis as well as prosthetic and rehabilitation applications
[1]. EMG signals are acquired by means of either surface elec-
trodes or concentric needle electrodes. The former approach
is noninvasive, which finds applications in the exoskeleton
and rehabilitation robots, hand gesture recognition, and pros-
Manuscript received December 02, 2014; revised May 17, 2015; accepted
July 01, 2015. Date of publication July 09, 2015; date of current version July
14, 2016.
G. R. Naik and H. T. Nguyen are with the Center of Health Technologies,
University of Technology Sydney, Sydney 2007, Australia (e-mail: Ganesh.
Naik@uts.edu.au; Hung.Nguyen@uts.edu.au).
S. E. Selvan is with the GIPSA-Lab, Université Grenoble Alpes, F-38000
Grenoble, France (e-mail: easter-selvan.suviseshamuthu@gipsa-lab.grenoble-
inp.fr).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TNSRE.2015.2454503
1534-4320 © 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
thetics. On the other hand, the latter method is employed for
diagnosing various neuromuscular disorders of neurogenic
and myopathic nature, which implies that nerves activating a
muscle are affected and merely muscle tissues are damaged,
respectively [1]–[4]. Specifically, EMG findings help detect
neuromuscular disorders that can affect motor units (MUs)
and identify their origin. In addition, the diagnosis assisted by
EMG findings obviates the need for muscle biopsies or more
sophisticated imaging techniques such as the ultrasound or
magnetic resonance imaging [5].
EMG signals can be recorded with varied degrees of volun-
tary muscle contraction, also known as the maximal voluntary
contraction (MVC). The increase in MVC leads to additional
firing of MUs, thereby resulting in a more complex EMG signal.
As a consequence, identifying individual motor unit action po-
tentials (MUAPs) becomes difficult. Furthermore, the type and
shape of different MUAPs remain unaltered across discharges in
most of the instances. Therefore, different quantitative analyses
and pattern recognition techniques are resorted to in order to
identify the MUAPs [6]. Especially the quantitative analysis of
EMG signals provides a vital clue for assessing several diseases
that affect the spinal cord and other parts of the body. For this
reason, algorithms within these frameworks are on the rise [6],
[7].
Classification of neuromuscular disorder EMG data acquired
by a single-channel needle electrode poses the following chal-
lenges, and hence remains an active topic of research. Despite
the excitation of a few motor neurons in neurogenic disorders,
the regrouping of muscle fibers will give rise to larger MUs,
which is causative of MUAPs having a larger amplitude and
a longer duration compared to normal ones. On the contrary,
in myopathic disorders, due to the loss of individual muscle
fibers, MUAPs remain smaller in amplitude and persist only
for a shorter duration [5]. Moreover, during the early stages
and mild occurrences of neurogenic and myopathic disorders,
the changes induced in the EMG signals often remain subtle,
which would impose difficulties in quantifying such changes
for diagnostic purposes [2], [5]. In the recent past, many pat-
tern recognition methods were deployed to classify several neu-
romuscular disorders of both neurogenic and myopathic cate-
gories [5], [8], [9]. These methods are mainly based on either
the extraction of MUAPs or the EMG decomposition [10], [11].
In general, the morphological features associated with MUAPs
such as the duration, amplitude, area, number of phases, and
number of turns are made use of in the classification of neuro-
muscular disorder data [11], [12]. For instance in [12], a clas-
NAIK et al.: SINGLE-CHANNEL EMG CLASSIFICATION WITH ENSEMBLE-EMPIRICAL-MODE-DECOMPOSITION-BASED ICA
sifier with wavelet-based statistical features has been built. In
another study, Subasi et al. proposed an adaptive neuro-fuzzy
inference system for classifying the neuro data collected from
subjects diagnosed with neurogenic and myopathic disorders
[9]. In a more recent work, Doulah et al. extracted dominant
MUAPs with the help of a wavelet-based statistical method,
and classified normal, myopathic, and amyotrophic lateral scle-
rosis (ALS) data using a -nearest neighbor classifier [8]. Nev-
ertheless, one must remember that the use of wavelet functions
often warrants the manual intervention as cautioned in [13]. Fur-
thermore, a wavelet-transform-based approach attempts to clas-
sify neurogenic and myopathic disorders by selecting specific
detail coefficients from each level, which may not be feasible
for all MUAPs [8]. Besides, an MUAP-based method treats all
available MUAPs equally, disregarding the existence of non-
stationary MUAPs, which would result in misleading findings
[9]. An increasing trend can be observed in the usage of blind
source separation (BSS) methods such as the independent com-
ponent analysis (ICA) in processing the EMG data—artifact re-
moval, e.g., [14] and [15], feature extraction, and signal identi-
fication—and in neuroengineering applications [16]–[18]. The
key advantage of the ICA resides in its ability to decompose the
EMG signal into the underlying MUAPs [18], [19].
In order to perform the single-channel EMG source sep-
aration, the conventional BSS/ICA algorithms need to be
appropriately tailored; a few instances of them have been
reported in [20], [21], and [22]. Of specific interest here is the
empirical mode decomposition (EMD)-based approach, which
is one among the most celebrated techniques to accomplish
this task [23]. An EMD-based algorithm first decomposes the
single channel into a series of data sequences called intrinsic
mode functions (IMFs). In the subsequent step, a traditional
ICA algorithm is applied to the IMFs to compute the indepen-
dent components (ICs). Despite its usefulness, a few issues
remain unaddressed with the EMD. A major drawback is
termed mode mixing, wherein either a single IMF consists of
signals of widely disparate scales or a signal of a similar scale
resides in different IMF components [24], [25]. Therefore,
a noise-assisted data analysis method, namely, the ensemble
EMD (EEMD) has been introduced, which aims to counteract
this effect by way of considering an IMF component as the
mean of an ensemble of trials that consists of the signal and a
white noise of finite amplitude [26]. Owing to its success, the
EEMD algorithm received an inordinate amount of attention
from the signal processing community [25], [27], [28].
The objective of this work is to build an approach with the
EEMD-ICA algorithm, linear discriminant analysis (LDA),
and a majority voting scheme so as to discriminate between the
normal, myopathic, and ALS subjects. The data decomposed
by the EEMD-ICA are initially classified using the LDA. In the
following step, the recognition performance is further enhanced
with a majority voting scheme. The remainder of this article
is organized as follows. The basic concepts of EEMD-ICA
are explained in Section II. The methodology that includes the
data acquisition, source estimation, feature extraction, feature
reduction, classification, and post-processing is succinctly pre-
sented in Section III. The results obtained with a clinical EMG
dataset are in order in Section IV. Finally, suitable conclusions
are drawn in Section V.
735
II. PRELIMINARIES OF EEMD-ICA
The EMD is a nonlinear technique engineered to adaptively
represent a nonstationary signal as a sum of amplitude and fre-
quency modulated components. It is therefore employed to de-
compose a complicated set of data into a finite number of IMFs
that admit a well-behaved Hilbert transform. In practice, one
IMF can be deduced by the following sifting procedure. Given
a signal expressed as a function of time , all its extrema are
identified to begin with. Next, an upper envelope is formed
by interpolating the local maxima, and a lower envelope
by interpolating the local minima. A mean envelope,
, is then calculated. Now after subtracting the
mean envelope from the signal, i.e.,
is verified whether it satisfies the following IMF conditions.
1) The total number of local extrema and that of the zero
crossings must either be equal or differ at most by one in
the entire data.
2) At a given time instant, the mean value of must be
zero.
If the IMF conditions hold for , it is deemed an IMF or a
detail, i.e., , and hence the sifting is terminated.
Otherwise, by letting , the sifting continues until an
IMF is found. Consequently, we can write
with being the residual, which in turn is regarded as the
signal in the subsequent iteration. Thus by iteratively decom-
posing until the number of extrema falls below two, the
desired signal decomposition, , is
accomplished. However, as pointed out in Section I, the original
EMD algorithm suffers due to its sensitivity to noise. A reme-
dial measure to circumvent this drawback is the introduction of
a noise-assisted EMD version, i.e., EEMD. In this case, an en-
semble of trials is performed to compute an IMF set at each trial
, wherein the signal of interest is added to an independent and
identically distributed white noise having the same stan-
dard deviation as that of the signal, given by
. Therefore, the resulting signal ,
can be expressed in terms of the IMFs and the residual corre-
sponding to the trial as . Finally,
the mean of the -th IMFs across trials, , is computed as
.
The ICA on the other hand decomposes a multivariate data
into additive subcomponents, known as sources, which are as-
sumed to be statistically independent from each other and to
have non-Gaussian distributions. In principle, any ICA algo-
rithm minimizes a contrast function that measures the mutual
information (MI) among the data either directly or indirectly,
subject to necessary constraints. While the algorithms built on
the MI yield accurate estimation of the sources, they in general
incur computational burden due to the need to estimate density
distributions of sources. Alternatively, one can rely on surro-
gate contrast functions such as the kurtosis and negentropy to
design a computationally efficient ICA method. Interestingly,
the surrogate-contrast-based approaches, e.g., FastICA in [29],
Infomax in [30], and JADE in [31], gained popularity since
they have been extensively applied to practical source separa-
tion scenarios. In a noise-free ICA model, , the
sources are assumed to have
736 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL SYSTEMS AND REHABILITATION ENGINEERING, VOL. 24, NO. 7, JULY 2016
Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the proposed EEMD-ICA-based neuromuscular disorder classifier.
undergone linear mixing to produce the observations
, and the mixing matrix is denoted as
. In a simple case, the number of sources is consid-
ered to be equal to that of the observations. An ICA algorithm
aims at estimating the demixing matrix up to per-
mutation and scaling of columns, thereby recovering the sources
. concentric needle electrode having a leading-off area of 0.07
Since we deal with the single-channel signal, performing
EMD would allow the decomposition of the signal into a finite
set of IMFs that are monocomponents, zero-mean oscilla-
tory functions, and orthogonal to each other. Instead, in this
work the EEMD algorithm is resorted to for decomposing the
single-channel EMG signal with a desirable consequence of
canceling noisy components. The set of averaged IMFs derived
from the EEMD is then applied to the FastICA algorithm to
recover the sources from the mixing matrix estimate. Precisely,
we adopt the EEMD-ICA algorithm—meant for estimating
sources using the FastICA algorithm, which regards the ex-
tracted IMFs from the EEMD as mixtures—in the vein of [28].
Interested readers may refer to the step-wise implementation of
EEMD-ICA presented in [28, p. 2190].
III. METHODOLOGY
The schematic diagram in Fig. 1 outlines the proposed
strategy intended for classifying the EMG data to diagnose
neuromuscular diseases, i.e., myopathic and ALS. Upon being
supplied with the single-channel EMG signal, the EEMD
decomposes the input into IMFs, which in turn are separated
by the FastICA algorithm. The sources thus reconstructed are
segmented into 64 frames from which five time domain features
are extracted. Subsequently, a reduced set of features are clas-
sified by the LDA. The classification results are then fine-tuned
by the majority voting scheme. Each of these modules has been
dealt with in detail in the section that follows.
A. Data Acquisition
The EMG data classifier has been tested with a publicly avail-
able clinical EMG database of 250 recordings, which comprises
data belonging to the following categories: 1) normal (150); 2)
myopathy (50); and 3) ALS (50) [32]. The database includes
the EMG data from ten normal subjects—six males and four
females—aged between 21 and 37 years, seven cases with my-
opathy—five males and two females—between the ages 19 and
63, and eight ALS patients—four males and four females—with
ages ranging from 35 to 67 years.
This study has been performed with the EMG signals
recorded from the brachial biceps muscles as they have often
been preferred for investigating whether a subject falls under
either the normal, myopathy or ALS category. What follows
are the subtleties concerning the recording procedure. The
EMG signal acquisition was carried out by inserting a standard
mm into the muscle along with a surface ground electrode
placed on the limb. Possible needle movements were averted
by fastening the cable that connects the needle to the amplifier
with a tape. During the course of recording, the patient was
instructed to apply a slight and constant contraction. The signal
was surveilled both visually as well as audibly with the aid
of two computer monitors and a speaker. The amplitude and
duration of an MUAP picked up by the needle electrode were
measured on an oscilloscope panel that includes a trigger and
a delay line system. The MUAPs that satisfy the trigger crite-
rion were in turn frozen on the oscilloscope screen. Besides,
it was affirmed that a single MU gave rise to an MUAP by
verifying whether the same potential was recorded multiple
times. A maximum of three different MUAPs were in general
recorded at a single insertion site within an epoch of 50 ms.
Concurrently, the EMG signal for the last half a second duration
was continuously displayed on the other monitor to ascertain
the suitability of the signal for decomposition. Additionally, a
characteristic crispy repetitive sound from the speaker cautions
the personnel if the tip of the needle happens to get closer to
some muscle fibre. Once the signal was certified to be of usable
quality—suitable for the evaluation of MUAP parameters
and neither too complex nor too noisy—it was recorded for a
duration of 11.2 s. Thus recording everything within an epoch
of 11.2 s avoids the probable bias toward an MUAP associated
with a predetermined diagnosis. The needle was then inserted
to another location or to another depth. Care was taken to desist
from recording more than once from the same MU, and to
ensure the exploration of the whole muscle. In like manner,
approximately twenty signals were recorded.
The EMG signals thus acquired by the needle electrode
were amplified 4000 times using a differential amplifier (DISA
15C01 with 250 M and 0.7 V noise level), and filtered
with an analog band-pass filter. The lower and upper cut-off
frequencies of the band-pass filter were 2 Hz and 10 kHz,
respectively. In the ensuing step, the amplified signals were
sampled at a rate of 23 438 Hz and digitized with a 16 bit
resolution (using Motorola DSP56ADC16). One may further
refer to [32] for a detailed account on the EMG data acquisition
NAIK et al.: SINGLE-CHANNEL EMG CLASSIFICATION WITH ENSEMBLE-EMPIRICAL-MODE-DECOMPOSITION-BASED ICA
Fig. 2. Typical EMG data patterns for various categories. (a) Normal. (b) My-
opathy. (c) ALS.
procedure. Typical EMG signal patterns corresponding to a
normal subject, a myopathic case, and an ALS patient are
shown in Fig. 2.
B. Source Estimation
To empirically arrive at an optimal number of IMFs that rea-
sonably reproduce an EMG recording, the latter was decom-
posed into nine sets of IMFs, each set containing four to 12 en-
tities. The original EMG signal was then reconstructed using
every set of IMFs, and the mean square error (MSE) corre-
sponding to each reconstruction was plotted against the number
of IMFs. From the knee point detected in the scree plot, we in-
ferred that eight IMFs are sufficient to rebuild an EMG signal
with a reduced MSE in most of the cases. Therefore, throughout
this study, only eight IMFs are deduced from an EMG signal,
which amounts to eight estimated ICA sources.
C. Extracted Features
An estimated source from the EEMD-ICA algorithm is seg-
mented into 64 distinct frames, each containing 4096 samples1.
From a window of a segmented source estimate, which has the
same width as that of the frame but allows an overlap of 25%
with an adjacent one, five time domain features are extracted.
Listed below are these features, which in turn are handled by
the subsequent classifier stage. One may also refer to [33, p.
853] for a concise description of the waveform length (WL),
zero crossings (ZC), and slope sign changes (SSC), whereas the
Willison amplitude (WA) and root mean square (RMS) have
been adopted from the works mentioned in [34] and [35], re-
spectively. For the sake of completeness, we recapitulate them
here.
• Waveform Length. Given a waveform or time series
with number of time samples, the cumulative change
1Note that the 64-th frame contains only 4082 samples.
737
in amplitude between adjacent time samples is denoted by
WL, expressed as
(1)
It is known to effectively capture the information regarding
the amplitude, frequency, and duration of the waveform.
• Zero Crossings. The total number of times a waveform
switches from a positive amplitude to a negative one and
vice versa is given by ZC. Owing to its susceptibility to
noise, unless the amplitude between two consecutive sam-
ples exceeds a threshold value, the zero crossing is not
taken into account. Therefore, a closed-form expression for
ZC that avoids a noise-induced zero crossing is
(2)
where
with sgn and being the signum function and a user-de-
fined threshold, respectively. This feature measures the fre-
quency with which the waveform undergoes significant
changes.
• Slope Sign Changes. The number of times the sign of the
slope alters among three consecutive samples in a wave-
form is represented by SSC. In order to preclude fluctu-
ations due to interferences, a threshold is usually em-
ployed to ensure that an amplitude change is significant as
follows:
(3)
where
• Willison Amplitude. The number of amplitude changes
exceeding a threshold between two consecutive samples
in a waveform is specified using WA, which is given by
(4)
where
WA is acclaimed to be a powerful feature that precisely ac-
counts for the muscle contraction level, provided a robust
estimate of noise is possible via an empirical study. The
discriminant power of WA is reported to be similar to that
of ZC and SSC.
738 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL SYSTEMS AND REHABILITATION ENGINEERING, VOL. 24, NO. 7, JULY 2016
• Root Mean Square. The RMS is computed by taking the
square root of the arithmetic mean of the squared sample
amplitudes of a waveform, and is denoted as
(5)
Interestingly, RMS is one of the widely used features to
analyze the surface EMG (sEMG) signals.
Note that in the context of sEMG analysis, by the term wave-
form in the aforementioned definitions, we mean the re-
constructed sources from the EEMD-ICA. The motivation for
choosing the time domain features in the present study is the
following. While being deployed to detect various gestures and
movements from EMG signals, the approaches relying on time
domain features have been claimed to achieve higher perfor-
mance than spectral methods based on the Fourier transform and
wavelet transform [36]–[38]. Notice that five features have been
extracted from each of the 64 frames pertinent to a set of eight
source estimates recovered from one of the 250 EMG record-
ings. As a result, it amounts to a total of 640 000 features, i.e.,
no. of features no. of frames no. of sources total record-
ings .
D. Feature Reduction
The EMG data classification task warrants feature reduction
because of the foreseen difficulty, known as curse of dimen-
sionality. To this end, one may apply the principal component
analysis (PCA) and a variant of LDA to map the feature vector
to a lower-dimensional space; consequently, the computational
overhead associated with the subsequent classification proce-
dure would be lessened. The PCA is an unsupervised statistical
approach, which converts the observations of variables that are
likely to be correlated into values of linearly uncorrelated vari-
ables via an orthogonal transform. Unlike PCA, the objective
of LDA is to find optimal discriminant features under super-
vised conditions by maximizing the ratio of the between-class
scatter to the within-class scatter of a given set of observa-
tions. Note, however, that the classical LDA is not suitable for
undersampled data, i.e., the dimension of the feature vector
is larger than the sample size, since it encounters singularity
problem while attempting to perform an eigen-decomposi-
tion on the scatter matrices that are singular. An improved
version of LDA, namely, uncorrelated LDA (ULDA), intro-
duces an additional requirement of extracting feature vectors
containing uncorrelated features, thereby minimizing redun-
dancy among selected features. It should be remarked that
the training data has exclusively been applied for training the
ULDA. Further enhancement to the ULDA—incorporating
an optimization criterion and the generalized singular value
decomposition—mitigates the issues related to singularity (see
[39] and [40]), and therefore we adopt this version for reducing
the dimensionality of the feature vector.
E. Classification
The choice of the classifier is crucial for the robustness of the
proposed neuromuscular disease diagnostic scheme. We rely on
a supervised statistical scheme, LDA, which transforms a set
of high-dimensional features derived from the single-channel
sEMG data into an optimal (lower-dimensional) discriminant
vector space, while preserving the class structure. The LDA
exploits the class information to enhance the discriminant
ability while performing classification tasks. In other words,
it maximizes the ratio of the between-class variance to the
within-class variance, thereby achieving maximum discrim-
ination. Formally, the within-class scatter matrix and
between-class scatter matrix can be defined as
(6)
(7)
where denotes the -th feature vector that belongs to class
of cardinality and represent the sample mean of fea-
ture vectors bearing class label and the overall sample mean,
respectively. Furthermore, the LDA classifier does not require
iterative training and it avoids the chances of under- or over-
training of data, which in turn lead to high classification ac-
curacies [40]. Note that since a good linear approximation of
a high-dimensional space can be realized by means of feature
reduction, it obviates the need of nonlinear classifiers such as
multi-layer perceptrons.
In view of classification, the dataset is divided into three
subsets, each comprising the following percentages of the
total data: 1) training set (50%), 2) validation set (25%), and
3) test set (25%). The LDA classifier has been supplied with
the time domain features to be assigned to any one of the
three categories—normal, myopathic, and ALS. The overall
classification accuracy (OCA) is expressed as follows:
% (8)
F. Post-Processing
The analysis window that collects the EMG data is in gen-
eral much larger than the processing time required to make class
decisions. Therefore, with an intent on making the best use of
the processor, it has been recommended to slide the analysis
window at an increment of time that is slightly larger than the
processing time. Consequently, the processor will never remain
idle as it ought to produce class decisions on the data encom-
passed by overlapping windows. This in turn will increase the
frequency with which the class decisions are taken. A reputed
post-processing technique, which exploits such a high density
stream of class decisions, is majority voting; a notable merit of
this approach is that it enhances the robustness of a classifier
by effectively smoothing out noisy decisions. By contrast, other
post-processing methods such as Bayesian fusion necessitate the
use of disjoint windows, and are hence not suitable for us [41].
Following is a brief account on how the majority voting scheme
is implemented that enables the fine-tuning of the already ob-
tained class decisions. Let be the number of class decisions
to be taken into account to determine the majority vote. In the
schematic in Fig. 3, is chosen to be nine as recommended in
NAIK et al.: SINGLE-CHANNEL EMG CLASSIFICATION WITH ENSEMBLE-EMPIRICAL-MODE-DECOMPOSITION-BASED ICA 739

Fig. 3. An illustration on how the majority voting scheme fine-tunes the al-
ready available class decisions. Among a set of class decisions enclosed by
the interval between the cyan arrows—the present one and the previous
ones—the most frequently occurring decision has been designated as the ma-
jority vote.

TABLE I
COMPARING ICA METHODS—JADE, INFOMAX, AND FASTICA—IN
THE EMG CLASSIFICATION CONTEXT. HIGHEST CLASSIFICATION
ACCURACY IS INDICATED IN BOLDFACE

this work, marked by the set of intervals with cyan arrows each
one enclosing nine class decisions. For instance, the interval de-
picted at the top in Fig. 3 encompasses the current class decision
(rightmost) denoted by label 1, and the eight former decisions
enlisted as 1, 1, 1, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3. Therefore, the class decision per-
taining to the present instant is simply the label that occurs the
most among {1, 1, 1, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 1}, which is 1. Similarly by
considering the current decision and the previous ones, the
most frequently occurring class label among the decisions is
selected by the scheme at all instances as shown at the bottom of
Fig. 3 with downward pink arrows. For an elaborate treatment
on the majority voting, readers may refer to [33] and [42].

IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

In pursuance of assessing the efficacy of the FastICA-based
EEMD for the EMG classification task, the performance of pop-
ular ICA approaches, namely, JADE and extended Infomax, in
conjunction with the EEMD algorithm were appraised for the
same task. The outcome of the analysis of variance (ANOVA)
reported in Table I asserts that the enhanced classification accu-
racy attained by the FastICA-based EEMD is statistically dif-
ferent from the rest. Notice that all the -values obtained from
the test— for EEMD-FastICA versus EEMD-
JADE, for EEMD-FastICA versus EEMD-In-
fomax, and for EEMD-FastICA vs. EEMD2—are
statistically significant, and thus remain in favor of the method
advocated in this work.
2This means that we preclude the source separation step from the classifier,
which has an adverse impact on the performance, and the related discussion is
deferred to the end of this section.
Fig. 4. Left: Decomposed IMFs, when the EEMD algorithm is supplied with
the single-channel EMG data from a typical normal (top), myopathic (middle),
and ALS (bottom) subject. Right: Estimated ICs from the respective IMFs using
the FastICA method.
Followed by the EEMD decomposition of a single-channel
EMG data into IMFs, the MI among the IMFs has been min-
imized with the FastICA technique. For the visual apprecia-
tion of both the IMFs and the respective sources derived from
three representative EMG data from a normal, myopathic, and
ALS subject, readers may refer to Fig. 4, wherein the IMFs and
the source estimates are juxtaposed to enable them to be com-
pared. In our experiments, prior to feeding the time domain fea-
tures to the LDA classifier, the dimensionality of the features
has been reduced by dint of the ULDA technique. As is cus-
tomary in the evaluation of EEG/EMG machine learning ap-
proaches (see [43] and [44]), a -fold cross validation strategy
740 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL SYSTEMS AND REHABILITATION ENGINEERING, VOL. 24, NO. 7, JULY 2016

TABLE II TABLE III

MEAN CONFUSION MATRIX FOR CLASSIFICATION RESULTS FROM LDA. MEAN CONFUSION MATRIX FOR LDA CLASSIFICATION RESULTS
BOLDFACED DIAGONAL ELEMENTS INDICATE THE CLASSIFICATION ACCURACY SMOOTHED BY MAJORITY VOTING. CLASSIFICATION ACCURACY
IS DENOTED IN BOLDFACE

Fig. 5. 3-D bar plot representing the mean confusion matrix for the results of
LDA classifier. Note that the diagonal/off-diagonal elements denote the classi- Fig. 6. 3-D bar plot to depict the mean confusion matrix corresponding to the
fication accuracy/misclassification in percentage. LDA classifier results, which are smoothed by the majority voting scheme. The
-axis denotes the classification performance in percentage.

has been adhered to, with being three, to evaluate the classi-
fication task. We ensured that all the features were included for
both the training and validation, whereas each feature was al-
lowed only once for the validation. In the sequel, the classifier
outcome under each category is the set of mean classification
accuracies resulted from each fold. The classification results of
the LDA that categorize the normal, myopathic, and ALS sub-
jects, in terms of the mean confusion matrix3, are portrayed in
Table II and Fig. 5. As can be noticed from the mean confu-
sion matrix, none of the healthy subjects was misclassified by
the LDA as the one suffering from either myopathy or ALS. To
summarize, our classification scheme intended for segregating
the three classes—normal, myopathic, and ALS—yielded an ac-
curacy of 96.4%.
In order to further improve the classification accuracy, the
Fig. 7. 3-D bar plot illustrating the mean confusion matrix built from the LDA
majority voting method has been adopted. Recall that this post- classifier results, which underlines the critical role played by the source sep-
processing method considers the current classification result in aration stage on the enhancement of classifier performance. Note that there is
conjunction with the previous eight results, and on the basis of an appreciable increase in the values of the off-diagonal elements that express
misclassification percentages along the -axis, as a consequence of ignoring the
the class that appears the most among them, a classification de- ICA estimation step.
cision is taken as shown in Fig. 3. This results in a “smooth
operation” that avoids spurious misclassification, which is ev-
idenced from the classification accuracy of 98% as shown in
technique being proposed. A straightforward expedient to study
Table III and Fig. 6. Altogether, in five cases the proposed clas-
this effect is by precluding the ICA decomposition module from
sifier failed to correctly predict the categories.
the experimental setting displayed in Fig. 1; this means that the
It is also worthwhile to investigate the influence of the source
IMFs from the EEMD algorithm are directly segmented into
separation technique on the classification performance of the
the specified number of frames for further processing. What is
3The mean confusion matrix summarizes the mean and standard deviation of interest is the inference that the computational efforts due
of the classification accuracies resulted from the three-fold cross validation. to the minimization of MI among the IMFs via the FastICA
NAIK et al.: SINGLE-CHANNEL EMG CLASSIFICATION WITH ENSEMBLE-EMPIRICAL-MODE-DECOMPOSITION-BASED ICA
TABLE IV
MEAN CONFUSION MATRIX FOR DEGRADED LDA CLASSIFICATION AS A
RESULT OF OMITTING THE SOURCE SEPARATION STEP. CLASSIFICATION
ACCURACY IS EXPRESSED BY BOLDFACED DIAGONAL ELEMENTS
TABLE V
INFLUENCE OF INDIVIDUAL FEATURES AND THEIR COMBINATIONS
ON THE CLASSIFICATION ACCURACY
have indeed paid off, which can be endorsed from Table IV and
Fig. 7 that quantify the degradation of the classifier performance
otherwise.
To appreciate the influence of each feature and their combi-
nations on the classification performance, the experiment was
repeated first by applying only the individual features and then
an exhaustive list of 26 combinations of them. The effective-
ness of jointly considering the five features is apparent from the
improvement in classification consolidated in Table V.
741
TABLE VI
PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF EMG CLASSIFIERS. THE HIGHEST
CLASSIFICATION ACCURACY IS DENOTED IN BOLDFACE
Of relevance here is to recall the EMG classification results
yielded by algorithms akin to ours that have already been
reported in the literature to learn how the method presented
herein compares with the rest. Toward this, the OCAs in
percentage from the support vector machine (SVM) in [45],
ensemble SVM in [46], particle swarm optimization (PSO)
SVM in [47], a combination of the discrete wavelet transform
(DWT) and random forest (RF) in [48], and the EEMD-Fas-
tICA-LDA classifier described in Section III are collocated in
Table VI. Aside from the comparison of performance measure,
Table VI contains the total number of subjects and classes under
study. Observe that 25 subjects—ten normal, eight neuropathy,
and seven myopathy—have been classified using the SVM in
[45] and the DWT-RF in [48]. On the other hand, the ensemble
SVM in [46] and PSO SVM in [47] have solely dealt with
two classes, namely, neuropathy and myopathy, involving 27
subjects—seven cases each under the normal as well as the
myopathy categories and 13 neuropathy patients. Moreover,
the methodologies in [46] and [47] have been derived from the
evolutionary algorithm and PSO, wherein the computational
bottleneck and lack of theoretical guarantees are inherent
limitations. In spite of its accuracy and efficiency, the RF
classifier requires a large memory, slows down in case of large
number of trees during real-time predictions, lacks the capacity
for extrapolation, and tends to overfit while classifying the
noisy data. Recollect that the downside of DWT is the human
intervention and the impracticability in the choice of detail
coefficients for the MUAPs.
Recall that the etiology of neuromuscular disorders varies
widely, i.e., the muscle fibers, tissues, and nerves from where the
disease stems from cannot be trivially tracked from the symp-
toms. Therefore, an accurate classification of the subjects suf-
fering due to these ailments holds paramount importance in
administering an effective treatment [2], [5]. Note that classi-
fying the MUAPs, which have been decomposed from a single-
channel EMG signal, is deemed a typical supervised learning
pattern classification problem due to the fact that the number
of MUAPs that constitute an EMG signal and the number of
MUAPs per class are unknown. The outcome of the investiga-
tions endorses that the scheme consisting of the EEMD-ICA,
LDA, and majority voting leads to an accurate classification
of subjects suffering from myopathy and ALS or normal ones,
with a reduced computational burden. In other words, the classi-
fication results extracted from simultaneously acquired single-
channel EMG signals render clinically relevant information re-
lating to the structural and functional aspects of the MUs of a
muscle.
742 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL SYSTEMS AND REHABILITATION ENGINEERING, VOL. 24, NO. 7, JULY 2016
We admit that the classifier, whose outcome was smoothed
by the majority voting scheme, failed to correctly classify three
myopathic and two ALS subjects out of 50 cases under each
category. The misclassification may presumably be due to the
complex nature of MUAPs or the extracted features being sig-
nificantly different from the typical ones pertinent to these cat-
egories, which warrants further dedicated research pursuits.
A noteworthy merit of this approach is that the feature di-
mension is kept very low, thereby relieving the computational
complexity. As inherent to any EEMD-ICA-based approach, the
IMFs are separated in a blind manner, which give rise to domi-
nant sources/MUs.
V. CONCLUSION
To conclude, we have described an automated intramuscular
single-channel EMG signal classification scheme and validated
its performance. This approach decomposes a single-channel
EMG signal into its constituent MUAPs with the EEMD-ICA,
reduces the dimensionality of the extracted time-domain fea-
tures with the ULDA, classifies them using the LDA, and
smooths the classification results with the majority voting
scheme. For evaluation, the EMG signals corresponding to
normal, myopathic, and ALS subjects were made use of, and
the reported classification accuracy is promising.
Admittedly, the classification accuracy relies on the type of
features extracted from the EMG recordings. Since neurophysi-
ologists may have substantial access to a patient's data in a clin-
ical setting, an interesting research lead would be to investigate
the influence of the clinical real-time data on the classification
outcome. Even though the empirical findings are encouraging,
additional clinical assessments are required to further validate
the applicability of our method in practice.
Based on the experimental results, we envisage that devel-
oping a fully-automated EMG signal analysis system, which
would be accurate, simple, fast, and reliable enough to be ap-
plied in a clinical environment, is in the offing.
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743
Ganesh R. Naik (M’08–SM’15) received the B.E.
degree in electronics and communication engineering
from the University of Mysore, India, in 1997, the
M.E. degree in communication and information engi-
neering from Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia,
in 2002, and the Ph.D. degree in electronics engi-
neering, specializing in biomedical engineering and
signal processing from RMIT University, Melbourne,
Australia, in 2009.
Since 2013, he has been working as the Chan-
cellor's Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty
of Engineering and Information Technology (FEIT), University of Technology
Sydney. As an early career researcher, he has edited 10 books, authored more
than 80 papers in peer reviewed journals, conferences, and book chapters over
the last seven years. He serves as an Associate Editor for and two Springer
journals (Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing and Australasian Physical
& Engineering Sciences in Medicine).
Dr. Naik serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE ACCESS. He is a recipient of
the Baden-Württemberg Scholarship from the University of Berufsakademie,
Stuttgart, Germany (2006–2007). In 2010, he was awarded an ISSI overseas
fellowship from Skilled Institute Victoria, Australia.
S. Easter Selvan received the B.E. degree in elec-
tronics and communication engineering from the
Government College of Engineering, Tirunelveli,
India, in 1988, the M.E. degree in applied electronics
from Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, India, in
2001, and the Ph.D. degree in multispectral satellite
image analysis from the Laboratoire des Sciences
de l'Information et des Systèmes, Université de la
Méditerranée, Marseille, France, in 2007.
He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Bioimaging
and Biostructure Institute, Italian National Research
Council, Naples, Italy, from 2008 to 2010, and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow
at the Department of Mathematical Engineering, Université catholique de
Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, from 2010 to 2014. Since 2014, he has
been a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the GIPSA-Lab, Université Joseph Fourier,
Grenoble, France. His research focus encompasses statistical signal processing,
blind source separation, medical image analysis, optimization on matrix
manifolds, machine learning, and bio-inspired computing.
Hung T. Nguyen (SM’99) received the B.E. degree
(with First Class and University Medal) and the Ph.D.
degree from the University of Newcastle, Newcastle,
Australia, in 1976 and 1980, respectively.
He is a Professor of electrical engineering at the
University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Ultimo,
Australia. He is Assistant Deputy Vice Chancellor
(Innovation) and Director of the Centre for Health
Technologies at the UTS. He has been involved with
research in the areas of biomedical engineering,
advanced control, and artificial intelligence for more
than 20 years. He has developed several biomedical devices and systems for
diabetes, disability, cardiovascular diseases, and breast cancer. He was an
Engineering Manager of Power Electronics Pty. Ltd., from 1988 to 1998, the
Founding and Executive Director of AIMedics Pty. Ltd., from 2001 to 2006,
and Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, from
2009 to 2014.
Prof. Nguyen is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers, Australia, and the
British Computer Society.