Synchronization analysis of electroencephalogram (EEG) and electromyogram (EMG) could reveal the functional corticomuscular coupling (FCMC) during the motor task in human. A novel method combining Gabor wavelet and transfer entropy (Gabor-TE) is proposed to quantitatively analyze the nonlinearly synchronous corticomuscular function coupling and direction characteristics under different steady-state force. Firstly, the Gabor wavelet transform method was used to acquire the local frequency-band signals of the EEG and EMG signals recorded from nine healthy controls simultaneously during performing grip task with four different steady-state forces. Secondly, the TE of local frequency-band was calculated and the unit area index of the transfer (ATE) was defined to quantitatively analyze the synchronous corticomuscular function coupling and direction characteristics under steady-state force. Lastly, the effect of EEG and EMG signal power spectrum on Gabor-TE analysis was explored. The results showed that the coupling strength in the beta band was stronger in EEG→EMG direction than in EMG→EEG direction, and the ATE values in the beta band in EEG→EMG direction decreased with the force increasing. It is also shown that the difference in TE values of gamma band present a varying regularity as the increase of force in both directions. In addition, EMG power spectrum was significantly correlated with the result of Gabor-TE inspecific frequency band. The results of our study confirmed that Gabor-TE can quantitatively describe the nonlinearly synchronous corticomuscular function coupling in both local frequency band and information transmission. The analysis of FCMC provides basic information for exploring the motor control and the evaluation of clinical rehabilitation.
The motor nervous system transmits motion control information through nervous oscillations, which causes the synchronous oscillatory activity of the corresponding muscle to reflect the motion response information and give the cerebral cortex feedback, so that it can sense the state of the limbs. This synchronous oscillatory activity can reflect connectivity information of electroencephalography-electromyography (EEG-EMG) functional coupling. The strength of the coupling is determined by various factors including the strength of muscle contraction, attention, motion intention etc. It is very significant to study motor functional evaluation and control methods to analyze the changes of EEG-EMG synchronous coupling caused by different factors. This article mainly introduces and compares coherence and Granger causality of linear methods, the mutual information and transfer entropy of nonlinear methods in EEG-EMG synchronous coupling, and summarizes the application of each method, so that researchers in related fields can understand the current research progress on analysis methods of EEG-EMG synchronous systematically.