New Perspectives for Computer-Aided Discrimination of Parkinson’s Disease and Essential Tremor

Figure 2

Experimental methods and estimation of the neural drive to muscle. Left: schematic of two 64-channel electrode arrays placed on the wrist flexors and extensors. Right: multichannel surface EMG in pathological tremor (upper panel) and its decomposition into constituent motor unit spike trains (lower panel). Decomposition allows for the identification of motor unit firing patterns and thus of the neural drive to muscles. Each vertical line in the lower right panel denotes an individual motor unit firing, whereas different motor units are depicted by different colors. Motor unit firing patterns are highly synchronized and have been identified using the Convolution Kernel Compensation (CKC) method [24]. Summed MU spike trains form cumulative spike train (CST; bottom-most panel).