Join us for a special seminar with Dr. Armando Malanda Trigueros.
Motor units (MU) are the basic element of voluntary muscle contraction and are composed of a motor-neuron and the muscle fiber innervated by it. The transmission time that an electrical impulse traveling through the motor neuron takes to reach the fibers and fire action potentials in these fibers vary across successive motor neuron impulses. This variability, technically known as ´jitter´ may be increased when the motor unit is affected by disease or age and can be measured from intramuscular EMG recordings. In the extreme case called ´blocking,´ the potential in a fiber is not elicited at all. The processes of measuring jitter and detecting blocking potentials are time consuming and subjective, so that automatic algorithms may help doctors to do these tasks more reliably and efficiently.
To analyze the EMG signal, successive potentials fired from single motor units (MUPs), are extracted by manual or automatic procedures. These MUP trains are usually contaminated by MUPs originated in other motor units. The problem of cleaning out these alien MUPs is of major importance in clinical neurophysiology practice, and doctors spend much of their time cleaning up these potentials.
In the first part of this seminar, several new algorithms for cleaning up MUP trains will be discussed and compared. In the second part, new automatic methods that provide jitter estimation and blocking detection from EMG signals will be described.
Attending this seminar will count towards the graduate student seminar attendance milestone!
Armando Malanda Trigueros was born in Madrid, Spain. In 1992, he graduated in Telecommunication Engineering from Madrid Polytechnic University. In 1999, he received his PhD degree from Carlos III University, Madrid, his Doctoral Thesis work being related to the use of genetic algorithms for improving the efficiency in coding of signals and images.
In 1992, a few months after completing his undergraduate degree, he joined the Public University of Navarra (UPNA), where he started teaching at the School of Industrial and Telecommunication Engineering. He became an Associate Professor in 2003. He has taught 20 different courses at the Bachelor and Master’s levels related to telecommunication engineering and biomedical engineering. He is currently the Director of the Master of Biomedical Engineering at UPNA.
Among his research merits, he has published 65 international scientific papers and 4 book chapters, presented over 79 works at international conferences and 45 at national conferences, participated in 11 publicly financed projects, being the project leader of 5 of them and supervised 5 PhD Doctoral Thesis.
His area of expertise is the processing of biomedical signals, mainly electromyography (EMG). He leads a research team at UPNA which has actively collaborated with several institutions in the world and particularly with the Neurophysiology Service of the Navarra University Hospital, through multiple projects and studies with the main objective of improving the techniques for capturing, analyzing and interpreting EMG signals.
In 2008, he came to Canada for 6 months to work with Professor Daniel Stashuk in the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Professor Stashuk is a notorious researcher in the area of EMG signal analysis, and they both set out to find techniques for measuring motor unit instability. They finally came up with a new algorithm that solved the problem very precisely. Neurologist specialists from two Hospitals in Madrid and Lisbon joined this research and provided the signals to test the algorithm.
Six years later, Professor Malanda has come again to Waterloo, to enjoy a sabbatical year and extend his research with Professor Stashuk, now retired from teaching but still active as a scientist.
This seminar is sponsored by
