Timing and Classification of Patellofemoral Osteoarthritis Patients Using Fast Large Margin Classifier

Surface electromyogram (sEMG) processing and classification can assist neurophysiological standardization and evaluation and provide habitational detection. The timing of muscle activation is critical in determining various medical conditions when looking at sEMG signals. Understanding muscle activation timing allows identification of muscle locations and feature validation for precise modeling. This work aims to develop a predictive model to investigate and interpret Patellofemoral (PF) osteoarthritis based on features extracted from the sEMG signal using pattern classification. To this end, sEMG signals were acquired from five core muscles over about 200 reads from healthy adult patients while they were going upstairs. Onset, offset, and time duration for the Transversus Abdominus (TrA), Vastus Medialis Obliquus (VMO), Gluteus Medius (GM), Vastus Lateralis (VL), and Multifidus Muscles (ML) were acquired to construct a classification model. The proposed classification model investigates function mapping from real-time space to a PF osteoarthritis discriminative feature space. The activation feature space of muscle timing is used to train several large margin classifiers to modulate muscle activations and account for such activation measurements. The fast large margin classifier achieved higher performance and faster convergence than support vector machines (SVMs) and other state-of-the-art classifiers. The proposed sEMG classification framework achieved an average accuracy of 98.8% after 7 s training time, improving other classification techniques in previous literature.