Estimation of impulse response between electromyogram signals for use in conduction delay distribution estimation

The time delay between two surface electromyograms (EMGs) acquired along the conduction path is used to estimate mean action potential conduction velocity. Modeling the linear impulse response between “upstream” and “downstream” EMG signals permits an estimate of the distribution of velocities, providing more information. In this work, we analyzed EMG from bipolar electrodes placed on the tibialis anterior of 36 subjects, using an inter-electrode distance of 10 mm. Regularized least squares was used to fit the coefficients of a finite impulse response model. We trained the model on one recording, then tested on two others. The optimum correlation between the model-predicted and actual EMG averaged 0.70. We also compared estimation of the mean conduction delay from the peak time of the impulse response to the “gold standard” peak time of the cross-correlation between the upstream and downstream EMG signals. Optimal models differed from the gold standard by 0.02 ms, on average. Model performance was influenced by the regularization parameters. The impulse responses, however, incorrectly contained substantive power at very low time delays, causing delay distribution estimates to exhibit high probabilities at very short conduction delays. Unrealistic distribution estimates resulted. Larger inter-electrode spacing may be required to alleviate this limitation.