Establishment of the active region in scanning-MUP signals

Single needle multi scanning EMG is a research technique that provides a new useful way to obtain several motor unit potentials from a single scan. The main issue of this approach is that the solutions are numerous, most of them being invalid solut ions presenting only needle cannula pattern or spurious signals linked together. From the above, the main purpose of this work is to define and test algorithms that are able to estimate the spatial limits of the a ctive region of a motor unit potential and use it to distinguish among valid and invalid solutions. The dataset is provided by single-needle multiscannig-EMG simulations that allow to have a wide variability of records together with the ground truth limits. The proposed algorithms have to achieve two main tasks: discard the invalid signals and set the limits if a valid region of motor unit activity is found. Three different methods are proposed, described, and evaluated in this work. Results are analyzed for every method and compared between them. Considering only the cases in which a good overlapping with ground truth is available, all of the three algorithms are robust and show an appreciable level of accuracy in their estimation. When comparing them, two of the algorithms show a consistent unbias edness and a lower error variance than the third one.