Automatic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis detection using tunable Q-factor wavelet transform

Early diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) based on electromyography (EMG) is crucial. The processing of a non-stationary EMG signal requires powerful multi-resolution methods. Our study analyzes and classifies the EMG signals. In the present work, we introduce a novel flexible method for classification of EMG signals using tunable Q-factor wavelet transform (TQWT). Different sub-bands generated by the TQWT technique were served to extract useful information related to energy and then the calculated features were selected using a filter selection (FS) method. The effectiveness of the feature selection step resulted not only in the improvement of classification performance but also in reducing the computation time of the classification algorithm. The selected feature subsets were used as inputs to multiple classifier algorithms, namely, k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) and random forest (RF) for automated diagnosis. The experimental results show better classification measures with k-NN classifier compared with LS-SVM and RF. The robustness of the classification task was tested using a ten-fold cross-validation method. The outcomes of our proposed approach can be exploited to aid clinicians in neuromuscular disorders detection.