Deconvolution estimation of motor unit conduction velocity distribution

A conduction velocity distribution (CVD) estimator that incorporates volume conductor modeling of the muscle voluntary response is introduced in this paper. The CVD estimates are obtained from two correlation functions, an autocorrelation and a cross, computed from myoelectric signal recorded at the skin surface. The performance of the proposed estimator is evaluated for simulated and experimental data. The study includes assessment of the estimator bias and standard deviation, as well as its sensitivity to errors in the model parameters. Simulations show its good performance in terms of estimator bias. A filtering technique also helps reduce its variance. However, the inaccuracy introduced in the estimation of model parameters considerably deteriorates the estimator performance.