EMG feature assessment for myoelectric pattern recognition and channel selection: A study with incomplete spinal cord injury

Myoelectric pattern recognition with a large number of electromyogram (EMG) channels provides an approach to assessing motor control information available from the recorded muscles. In order to develop a practical myoelectric control system, a feature dependent channel reduction method was developed in this study to determine a small number of EMG channels for myoelectric pattern recognition analysis. The method selects appropriate raw EMG features for classification of different movements, using the minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance (mRMR) and the Markov random field (MRF) methods to rank a large number of EMG features, respectively. A k-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier was used to evaluate the performance of the selected features in terms of classification accuracy. The method was tested using 57 channels’ surface EMG signals recorded from forearm and hand muscles of individuals with incomplete spinal cord injury (SCI). Our results demonstrate that appropriate selection of a small number of raw EMG features from different recording channels resulted in similar high classification accuracies as achieved by using all the EMG channels or features. Compared with the conventional sequential forward selection (SFS) method, the feature dependent method does not require repeated classifier implementation. It can effectively reduce redundant information not only cross different channels, but also cross different features in the same channel. Such hybrid feature-channel selection from a large number of EMG recording channels can reduce computational cost for implementation of a myoelectric pattern recognition based control system.