Screening of sleep movement disorders via EMG signal analysis

It is estimated that 50 to 70 million Americans suffer from a chronic sleep disorder, which hinders their daily life, affects their health, and incurs a significant economic burden to society. Untreated Periodic Leg Movement (PLM) or Rapid Eye Movement Behaviour Disorder (RBD) could lead to a three to four-fold increased risk of stroke and Parkinson’s disease respectively. These risks bring about the need for less costly and more available diagnostic tools that will have great potential for detection and prevention. The goal of this study is to investigate the potentially clinically relevant but under-explored relationship of the sleep-related movement disorders of PLMs and RBD with cerebrovascular diseases. Our objective is to introduce a unique and efficient way of performing non-stationary signal analysis using sparse representation techniques. To fulfill this objective, at first, we develop a novel algorithm for Electromyogram (EMG) signals in sleep based on sparse representation, and we use a generalized method based on Leave-One-Out (LOO) to perform classification for small size datasets. In the second objective, due to the long-length of these EMG signals, the need for feature extraction algorithms that can localize to events of interest increases. To fulfill this objective, we propose to use the Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) algorithm by means of sparsity and dictionary learning. This allows us to represent a variety of EMG phenomena efficiently using a very compact set of spectrum bases. Yet EMG signals pose severe challenges in terms of the analysis and extraction of discriminant features. To achieve a balance between robustness and classification performance, we aim to exploit deep learning and study the discriminant features of the EMG signals by means of dictionary learning, kernels, and sparse representation for classification. The classification performances that were achieved for detection of RBD and PLM by means of implicating these properties were 90% and 97% respectively. The theoretical properties of the proposed approaches pertaining to pattern recognition and detection are examined in this dissertation. The multi-layer feature extraction provide strong and successful characterization and classification for the EMG non-stationary signals and the proposed sparse representation techniques facilitate the adaptation to EMG signal quantification in automating the identification process.