arXiv subjects

Alexander Kenneth Clarke

Publications and source records attributed to Alexander Kenneth Clarke.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Learning Cortico-Muscular Dependence through Orthonormal Decomposition of Density Ratios

The cortico-spinal neural pathway is fundamental for motor control and movement execution, and in humans it is typically studied using concurrent electroencephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG) recordings. However, current approaches for capturing high-level and contextual connectivity between these recordings have important limitations. Here, we present a novel application of statistical dependence estimators based on orthonormal decomposition of density ratios to model the relationship between cortical and muscle oscillations. Our method extends from traditional scalar-valued measures by learning eigenvalues, eigenfunctions, and projection spaces of density ratios from realizations of the signal, addressing the interpretability, scalability, and local temporal dependence of cortico-muscular connectivity. We experimentally demonstrate that eigenfunctions learned from cortico-muscular connectivity can accurately classify movements and subjects. Moreover, they reveal channel and temporal dependencies that confirm the activation of specific EEG channels during movement. Our code is available at https://github.com/bohu615/corticomuscular-eigen-encoder.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2024

Unlocking the Full Potential of High-Density Surface EMG: Novel Non-Invasive High-Yield Motor Unit Decomposition

The decomposition of high-density surface electromyography (HD-sEMG) signals into motor unit discharge patterns has become a powerful tool for investigating the neural control of movement, providing insights into motor neuron recruitment and discharge behavior. However, current algorithms, while very effective under certain conditions, face significant challenges in complex scenarios, as their accuracy and motor unit yield are highly dependent on anatomical differences among individuals. This can limit the number of decomposed motor units, particularly in challenging conditions. To address this issue, we recently introduced Swarm-Contrastive Decomposition (SCD), which dynamically adjusts the separation function based on the distribution of the data and prevents convergence to the same source. Initially applied to intramuscular EMG signals, SCD is here adapted for HD-sEMG signals. We demonstrated its ability to address key challenges faced by existing methods, particularly in identifying low-amplitude motor unit action potentials and effectively handling complex decomposition scenarios, like high-interference signals. We extensively validated SCD using simulated and experimental HD-sEMG recordings and compared it with current state-of-the-art decomposition methods under varying conditions, including different excitation levels, noise intensities, force profiles, sexes, and muscle groups. The proposed method consistently outperformed existing techniques in both the quantity of decoded motor units and the precision of their firing time identification. For instance, under certain experimental conditions, SCD detected more than three times as many motor units compared to previous methods, while also significantly improving accuracy. These advancements represent a major step forward in non-invasive EMG technology for studying motor unit activity in complex scenarios.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2024

Quasi-Linear ICA for Motor Unit Decomposition during Dynamic Contractions

Decomposing surface electromyography (EMG) into the spike trains of individual motor neurons is a long-standing inverse problem and a key step toward motor-neuron-driven neural interfaces such as prosthetics and exoskeletons. The standard approach, independent component analysis (ICA) of the multichannel signal, assumes that the mixing from neurons to electrodes is stationary in time. This assumption fails during movement, when volume-conductor deformation makes the mixing time-varying, and current decomposition algorithms are correspondingly restricted to isometric contractions. We introduce a quasi-linear ICA formulation in which a static linear separator is preceded by a learned, low-rank, time-varying invertible transformation. The separator is trained with an independence loss on the uncompensated projection, and the transformation with a stationarity loss on the recovered source. Gradients are not shared between the two, so the source-extraction step reduces to classical linear ICA and inherits its identifiability guarantee, while non-stationary distortion is absorbed by the transformation. The closed-form inverse of the transformation enables per-spike subtraction with a time-varying template during sequential peel-off. On a public benchmark of dynamic high-density EMG with ground-truth spike trains, the method outperforms four adaptive ICA baselines at every recall threshold, recovering more units at a higher accuracy.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Conditional Generative Models for Simulation of EMG During Naturalistic Movements

Numerical models of electromyographic (EMG) signals have provided a huge contribution to our fundamental understanding of human neurophysiology and remain a central pillar of motor neuroscience and the development of human-machine interfaces. However, whilst modern biophysical simulations based on finite element methods are highly accurate, they are extremely computationally expensive and thus are generally limited to modelling static systems such as isometrically contracting limbs. As a solution to this problem, we propose a transfer learning approach, in which a conditional generative model is trained to mimic the output of an advanced numerical model. To this end, we present BioMime, a conditional generative neural network trained adversarially to generate motor unit activation potential waveforms under a wide variety of volume conductor parameters. We demonstrate the ability of such a model to predictively interpolate between a much smaller number of numerical model's outputs with a high accuracy. Consequently, the computational load is dramatically reduced, which allows the rapid simulation of EMG signals during truly dynamic and naturalistic movements.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Deep Metric Learning with Locality Sensitive Angular Loss for Self-Correcting Source Separation of Neural Spiking Signals

Neurophysiological time series, such as electromyographic signal and intracortical recordings, are typically composed of many individual spiking sources, the recovery of which can give fundamental insights into the biological system of interest or provide neural information for man-machine interfaces. For this reason, source separation algorithms have become an increasingly important tool in neuroscience and neuroengineering. However, in noisy or highly multivariate recordings these decomposition techniques often make a large number of errors, which degrades human-machine interfacing applications and often requires costly post-hoc manual cleaning of the output label set of spike timestamps. To address both the need for automated post-hoc cleaning and robust separation filters we propose a methodology based on deep metric learning, using a novel loss function which maintains intra-class variance, creating a rich embedding space suitable for both label cleaning and the discovery of new activations. We then validate this method with an artificially corrupted label set based on source-separated high-density surface electromyography recordings, recovering the original timestamps even in extreme degrees of feature and class-dependent label noise. This approach enables a neural network to learn to accurately decode neurophysiological time series using any imperfect method of labelling the signal.

cs.LG↗