A Preliminary Study on Surface Electromyography Signal Analysis for Motion Characterization During Catheterization

Surface Electromyography (sEMG) signal has been widely applied in solving many mechanical control problems such as prosthetic control, medical rehabilitation and sports science. Similarly, this is becoming relatively applicable for interventional surgery where robotic catheter systems are being proposed for safe vascular catheterization. In this paper, two basic features are investigated for characterization of users’ hand movements during vascular catheterization. For this purpose, controlled experiments were setup to acquire sEMG signals from six different muscles of nine volunteers who were asked to perform four basic movements namely, move-out, move-in, turn-in, turn-out; used during intravascular catheterization. Two features namely, Average Electromyography and Root Mean Square, were defined over an acquired database of sEMG signals from the nine subjects. The features were utilized to characterize and analyze the different motions in the hand movements dataset. Analysis of the processed signal shows that both features are highly comparable in terms of mean amplitude for all movements across the nine subjects. A significant difference (\(p=0.048\)) was observed in the thumb abductor muscle, and just between move-in and turn-in movements.