|
|
||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
INNOVATIVE METHODOLOGY
1National Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Kyoto; 2Advanced Telecommunication Research Institute Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan; and 3Laboratory of Robotic Systems, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
Submitted 6 June 2006; accepted in final form 24 September 2006
Real-time acquisition of EMG during functional MRI (fMRI) provides a novel method of controlling motor experiments in the scanner using feedback of EMG. Because of the redundancy in the human muscle system, this is not possible from recordings of joint torque and kinematics alone, because these provide no information about individual muscle activation. This is particularly critical during brain imaging because brain activations are not only related to joint torques and kinematics but are also related to individual muscle activation. However, EMG collected during imaging is corrupted by large artifacts induced by the varying magnetic fields and radio frequency (RF) pulses in the scanner. Methods proposed in literature for artifact removal are complex, computationally expensive, and difficult to implement for real-time noise removal. We describe an acquisition system and algorithm that enables real-time acquisition for the first time. The algorithm removes particular frequencies from the EMG spectrum in which the noise is concentrated. Although this decreases the power content of the EMG, this method provides excellent estimates of EMG with good resolution. Comparisons show that the cleaned EMG obtained with the algorithm is, like actual EMG, very well correlated with joint torque and can thus be used for real-time visual feedback during functional studies.
| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
| Visit Other APS Journals Online |