Zhu Mingxing, Samuel Oluwarotimi Williams, Yang Zijian, Lin Wanhua, Huang Zhen, Fang Peng, Tan Jingqian, Li Peng, Tong Michael Chifai, Leung Karman Kaying, Chen Shixiong, Li Guanglin
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2018 Jul;2018:2454-2457. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2018.8512760.
Swallowing is an extremely complex motion controlled by multiple muscles on the front neck region. Normal swallowing is dependent on orderly activation and co-coordination of the associated neck muscles, known as muscle synergy. However, evidence for muscle synergy during normal swallowing is rarely investigated. In this study, we studied the muscle synergy associated with swallowing saliva based on high-density (HD) surface electromyography (sEMG) signals acquired from four healthy subjects. The non-negative matrix factorization algorithm was applied to reconstruct the muscle activation patterns, and the values of variance accounted for (VAF) coefficients were computed to determine the number of muscle synergies. The results showed that the VAF values raised with the increase in the number of synergies on both the left and right sides of the neck. And the variation tendency of the VAF values was almost similar between the left and right area with a significant correlation ($\text{r}=0.9902 \pm 0.0046$, $\mathrm {p}<0.05)$. Furthermore, it was observed that an average of 5 muscle synergies was the minimum number required to sufficiently reconstruct the spatial characteristics of the synergism between both sides of the neck. These results suggest that the muscle synergy approach could serve as a promising candidate to evaluate the muscular co-contractions during swallowing, and it might be a useful method for dysphagia monitoring and diagnoses.
吞咽是一种极其复杂的运动，由颈部前方的多块肌肉控制。正常吞咽依赖于相关颈部肌肉的有序激活和协同配合，即肌肉协同作用。然而，正常吞咽过程中肌肉协同作用的证据很少被研究。在本研究中，我们基于从四名健康受试者获取的高密度（HD）表面肌电图（sEMG）信号，研究了与吞咽唾液相关的肌肉协同作用。应用非负矩阵分解算法重建肌肉激活模式，并计算方差贡献率（VAF）系数的值以确定肌肉协同作用的数量。结果表明，颈部左右两侧的VAF值均随着协同作用数量的增加而升高。并且左右区域的VAF值变化趋势几乎相似，具有显著相关性（r = 0.9902±0.0046，p <0.05）。此外，观察到平均5种肌肉协同作用是充分重建颈部两侧协同作用空间特征所需的最小数量。这些结果表明，肌肉协同作用方法可作为评估吞咽过程中肌肉共同收缩的有前景的候选方法，并且可能是吞咽困难监测和诊断的有用方法。
