To better analyze the problem of abnormal neuromuscular coupling related to motor dysfunction for stroke patients, the functional coupling of the multichannel electromyography (EMG) were studied and the difference between stroke patients and healthy subjects were further analyzed to explore the pathological mechanism of motor dysfunction after stroke. Firstly, the cross-frequency coherence (CFC) analysis and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) were combined to construct a CFC-NMF model to study the linear coupling relationship in bands and the nonlinear coupling characteristics in different frequency ratios during elbow flexion and extension movement. Furthermore, the significant coherent area and sum of cross-frequency coherence were respectively calculated to quantitatively describe the intermuscular linear and nonlinear coupling characteristics. The results showed that the linear coupling relationship between multichannel muscles was different in frequency bands and the overall coupling was stronger in low frequency band. The linear coupling strength of the stroke patients was lower than that of the healthy subjects in different frequency bands especially in beta and gamma bands. For the nonlinear coupling, the intermuscular coupling strength of stroke patients in different frequency ratios was significantly lower than that of the healthy subjects, and the coupling strength in the frequency ratio 1∶2 was higher than that in the frequency ratio 1∶3. This method can provide a theoretical basis for exploring the intermuscular coupling mechanism of patients with motor dysfunction.
In order to more accurately and effectively understand the intermuscular coupling of different temporal and spatial levels from the perspective of complex networks, a new multi-scale intermuscular coupling network analysis method was proposed in this paper. The multivariate variational modal decomposition (MVMD) and Copula mutual information (Copula MI) were combined to construct an intermuscular coupling network model based on MVMD-Copula MI, and the characteristics of intermuscular coupling of multiple muscles of upper limbs in different time-frequency scales during reaching exercise in healthy subjects were analyzed by using the network parameters such as node strength and clustering coefficient. The experimental results showed that there are obvious differences in the characteristics of intermuscular coupling in the six time-frequency scales. Specifically, the triceps brachii (TB) had relatively high coupling strength with the middle deltoid (MD) and posterior deltoid (PD), and the intermuscular function was closely connected. However, the biceps brachii (BB) was independent of other muscles. The intermuscular coupling network had scale differences. MVMD-Copula MI can quantitatively describe the relationship of multi-scale intermuscular coupling strength, which has good application prospects.