RESEARCH ARTICLE


A System for the Synchronized Recording of Sonomyography, Electromyography and Joint Angle



Q.H Huanga, b, Y.P Zheng*, a, X Chenaa, J.F Hea, J Shia
a Department of Health Technology and Informatics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China
b Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China


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Creative Commons License
2007 Bentham Science Publishers Ltd.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), which permits unrestrictive use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Health Technology and Informatics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, P.R. China; Tel: 852-27667664; Fax: 852-23624365; E-mail: ypzheng@ieee.org


Abstract

Ultrasound and electromyography (EMG) are two of the most commonly used diagnostic tools for the assessment of muscles. Recently, many studies reported the simultaneous collection of EMG signals and ultrasound images, which were normally amplified and digitized by different devices. However, there is lack of a systematic method to synchronize them and no study has reported the effects of ultrasound gel to the EMG signal collection during the simultaneous data collection. In this paper, we introduced a new method to synchronize ultrasound B-scan images, EMG signals, joint angles and other related signals (e.g. force and velocity signals) in real-time. The B-mode ultrasound images were simultaneously captured by the PC together with the surface EMG (SEMG) and the joint angle signal. The deformations of the forearm muscles induced by wrist motions were extracted from a sequence of ultrasound images, named as Sonomyography (SMG). Preliminary experiments demonstrated that the proposed method could reliably collect the synchronized ultrasound images, SEMG signals and joint angle signals in real-time. In addition, the effect of ultrasound gel on the SEMG signals when the EMG electrodes were close to the ultrasound probe was studied. It was found that the SEMG signals were not significantly affected by the amount of the ultrasound gel. The system is being used for the study of contractions of various muscles as well as the muscle fatigue.

Keywords: Muscle, fatigue, ultrasound, electromyography, EMG, sonomyography, SMG..