應用表面肌電圖之交叉相關係數進行吞嚥障礙評估

Abstract

吞嚥障礙是一種由中風引起的併發症。吞嚥障礙的患者通常有營養不良，體重顯著的減少，和吸入性肺炎等臨床問題。表面肌電圖提供了一個簡單，無放射性，非侵入性的方法來測量肌肉活動模式以及用來描述吞嚥生理行為。以往的研究大多利用表面肌電訊號的強度跟時間長度來描述吞嚥行為。然而，以往的研究並沒有一個客觀、準確的方法來評估吞嚥協調性。為了更精確地評估吞嚥障礙病患的吞嚥協調性，我們利用交叉相關係數來計算喉部雙側肌肉群的表面肌電訊號的相關性。在此，交叉相關係數的變異量被定義為不協調指數，不協調指數可以反映出喉部雙側肌肉群的表面肌電訊號的差異。實驗結果表明，在不同吞嚥條件下，吞嚥障礙患者的不協調指數顯著大於健康受試者。此研究試圖提供一種對喉部雙側肌肉協調性的客觀量化方法，可作為未來在此方面研究方法的參考。

Dysphagia is a common complication caused by strokes. The dysphagic patients usually have clinical problems such as malnutrition, significant weight loss, and aspiration pneumonia. Surface electromyography provides a simple, non-radioactive, and non-invasive method to measure the muscle activity patterns during swallowing to describe physiology of swallowing behavior. Most of previous studies described the swallowing behavior by the terms of amplitude and duration. However, there is no objective and precise approach to evaluate swallowing coordination. In order to evaluate swallowing coordination more precisely, the cross-correlation coefficient was used to determine the correlation between the sEMG patterns of the bilateral muscle groups during swallowing process in this study. Here, the variations of the cross correlation coefficients were defined as the discoordination index which can reflect the difference between the sEMG patterns of the bilateral muscle groups. The experimental result shows that the discoordination indexes for dysphagic patients are significantly larger than those for healthy subjects under different swallowing conditions.