[CCoE Notice] Cullen College Dissertation Defense Announcement - Yang Liu

[Knudsen, Rachel W]

[Dissertation Defense Announcement at the Cullen College of Engineering]

Characterization of neuromuscular innervation in spastic muscle using high-density surface electromyography

Yang Liu

March 25, 2022; 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM (CST)
Zoom:  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://uofh.zoom.us/j/7065078826?pwd=YTVEOHo5WDg1VENqSUlNcUpYTWVhdz09__;!!LkSTlj0I!DAoIzpGsjYtKyoDSfRfG3o-_n-BYgpzqHA3JanTUXu2niuXEb2g0nPNrCSLINyeFi_EJXPAUxiNb2-npYpNf0PAk$ 

Committee Chair:
Yingchun Zhang, Ph.D.

Committee Members:
Tianfu Wu, Ph.D. | Jinsook Roh, Ph.D. | Stacey Gorniak, Ph.D. | Sheng Li, M.D, Ph.D.

Abstract

Information pertaining to neuromuscular innervation of muscles, such as the location of innervation zone (IZ) and the number of functioning motor units (MUs), is of great importance in understanding the neuropathology of neuromuscular disorders and motoneuron diseases, as well as in developing the advanced progress tracking and treatment approaches. The recent advances in surface electromyography (sEMG) signal acquisition and processing enable the comprehensive and the noninvasive assessment of neuromuscular innervation properties. The main goal of this dissertation is to establish advanced models and methods for evaluating neuromuscular innervation alterations in spastic muscles and employ them to assist clinical diagnosis and treatment.

This dissertation is composed of two parts. In the first part, the three dimensional IZ imaging (3DIZI) technique was firstly applied to characterize the MU distribution in the bilateral biceps brachii muscles (BBM) of chronic stroke survivors. Our findings demonstrated that larger MUs with higher recruitment threshold locate in deeper regions in non-spastic BBM, but this phenomenon was not observed from the spastic BBM. This technique was also employed to guide the botulinum neurotoxin (BoNT) injection in clinical post-stroke spasticity management and a significantly higher treatment efficiency was achieved in the 3DIZI-guided experimental group, compared the ultrasound-guided control group. To reduce the heavy modeling and computational loads of 3DIZI, a novel transcutaneous IZ imaging (TIZI) technique was developed to efficiently localize the IZ distribution on muscle surface. The experimental results performed on both of healthy and spastic flexor digitorum superficialis (FDS) muscles highly demonstrated its superior performance.

The second part of this study is to validate the repeatability of high-density weighted-average (HDWA) motor unit number estimation (MUNE) technique and evaluate its feasibility to characterize the motor unit loss under pathological conditions and post BoNT injection. Our findings demonstrated that this technique has high reproducibility and is applicable to characterize the motor unit loss following stroke, but may fail to detect the MU loss caused by the chemodenervation effect of BoNT due to the non-uniform denervation of the large and small size MUs.

In summary, the neuromuscular innervation under healthy and neuropathological conditions was systematically studied and compared. The promising results pave the road for future clinical applications.

[Engineered For What's Next]


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