AUTHOR=Ojha Anuj , Alderink Gordon , Rhodes Samhita 

TITLE=Coherence between electromyographic signals of anterior tibialis, soleus, and gastrocnemius during standing balance tasks

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 17 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2023.1042758

DOI=10.3389/fnhum.2023.1042758

ISSN=1662-5161

ABSTRACT=We examined the neural correlations during muscle activation related to quiet standing from the intermuscular coherence in different neural frequency bands. Electromyography (EMG) signals were recorded from six healthy participants (fs = 1200 Hz for 30 seconds) from three different muscles bilaterally: anterior tibialis, medial gastrocnemius, and soleus. Data were collected for four different postural stability conditions. In decreasing order of stability these were feet together eyes open, feet together eyes closed, tandem eyes open, and tandem eyes closed. Wavelet decomposition was used to extract the neural frequency bands: gamma, beta, alpha, theta, and delta. Magnitude-squared-coherence (MSC) was computed between different muscle pairs for each of the stability conditions. Results showed there was greater coherence between muscle pairs in the same leg. Coherence was greater in lower frequency bands. For all frequency bands, the standard deviation of coherence between different muscle pairs was always higher in the less stable positions. Time-frequency coherence spectrograms also showed higher intermuscular coherence for muscle pairs in the same leg and in less stable positions. Results indicate that coherence between EMG signals may be used as an independent indicator of the neural correlates for stability.