Genetics-based machine learning for the assessment of certain neuromuscular disorders

Clinical electromyography (EMG) provides useful information for the diagnosis of neuromuscular disorders. The utility of artificial neural networks (ANN´s) in classifying EMG data trained with backpropagation or Rohonen´s self-organizing feature maps algorithm has recently been demonstrated. The objective of this study is to investigate how genetics-based machine learning (GBML) can be applied for diagnosing certain neuromuscular disorders based on EMG data. The effect of GBML control parameters on diagnostic performance is also examined. A hybrid diagnostic system is introduced that combines both neural network and GBML models. Such a hybrid system provides the end-user with a robust and reliable system, as its diagnostic performance relies on more than one learning principle. GBML models demonstrated similar performance to neural-network models, but with less computation. The diagnostic performance of neural network and GBML models is enhanced by the hybrid system