Journal Article

NeuroMotion: Open-source Simulator with Neuromechanical and Deep Network Models to Generate Surface EMG signals during Voluntary Movement

Maksymenko, Kostiantyn, Zhao, Jiamin, Ma, Shihan, Caillet, Arnault Hubert, Clarke, Alexander Kenneth, Deslauriers-Gauthier, Samuel, Zhu, Xiangyang, Sheng, Xinjun, Guerra, Irene Mendez, Farina, Dario

2024

Overview

Neuromechanical studies investigate how the nervous system interacts with the musculoskeletal (MSK) system to generate volitional movements. Such studies have been supported by simulation models that provide insights into variables that cannot be measured experimentally and allow a large number of conditions to be tested before the experimental analysis. However, current simulation models of electromyography (EMG), a core physiological signal in neuromechanical analyses, are mainly limited to static contractions and cannot fully represent the dynamic modulation of EMG signals during volitional movements. Here, we overcome these limitations by presenting NeuroMotion, an open-source simulator that provides a full-spectrum synthesis of EMG signals during voluntary movements. NeuroMotion is comprised of three modules. The first module is an upper-limb MSK model with OpenSim API to estimate the muscle fibre lengths and muscle activations during movements. The second module is BioMime, a deep neural network-based EMG generator that receives nonstationary physiological parameter inputs, such as muscle fibre lengths, and efficiently outputs motor unit action potentials (MUAPs). The third module is a motor unit pool model that transforms the muscle activations into discharge timings of motor units. The discharge timings are convolved with the output of BioMime to simulate EMG signals during the movement. Here we also provide representative applications of NeuroMotion. We first show how simulated MUAP waveforms change during different levels of physiological parameter variations and different movements. We then show that the synthetic EMG signals during two-degree-of-freedom hand and wrist movements can be used to augment experimental data for regression. Ridge regressors trained on the synthetic dataset were directly used to predict joint angles from experimental data. NeuroMotion is the first full-spectrum EMG generative model to simulate human forearm electrophysiology during voluntary hand, wrist, and forearm movements. All intermediate variables are available, which allows the user to study cause-effect relationships in the complex neuromechanical system, fast iterate algorithms before collecting experimental data, and validate algorithms that estimate non-measurable parameters in experiments. We expect this full-spectrum model will complement experimental approaches and facilitate neuromechanical research.

• Publisher: PLOS
• Subject: Computer Science / Modeling and Simulation