Available at: https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/theses/2710
Date of Award
12-2023
Degree Name
MS in Biomedical Engineering
Department/Program
Biomedical Engineering
College
College of Engineering
Advisor
Robert Szlavik
Advisor Department
Biomedical Engineering
Advisor College
College of Engineering
Abstract
Motor unit number estimation (MUNE) is of clinical significance because information associated with motor unit populations and the loss of motor units over time are crucial to the diagnosis and monitoring of neuromuscular disorders. The responses of individual motor units can be extracted through incremental stimulation of a muscle group of interest and further analyzed through various methods to compute the MUNE. In this work, the utility of the perturbation-based decomposition by Szlavik will be investigated for this application and compared to the original MUNE approach developed by McComas. Successful decomposition may suggest an alternative method for motor unit number estimation. The decomposition was applied to synthetic incremental twitch tension waveforms and yielded satisfactory approximations of the contributions of individual motor units towards the compound muscle response.