Continuous and recurrent pattern dynamic neural networks recognition of electrophysiological signals

In the last few years, recurrent and continuous algorithms have became key factors in the solution of diverse pattern recognition problems. The main goal of this study is to introduce four classes of recurrent and continuous artificial neural networks (ANN) that can be implemented for pattern recognition of electrophysiological signals. Such networks are generally known as dynamic neural networks (DNN). The proposed DNN based pattern recognizer uses biosignals raw data as input. This processing method allows capturing the signal time dynamics, which is considered as an intrinsic characteristic of physiology signals. Therefore, recurrent and differential ANN structures were developed to construct different versions of dynamic automatic pattern recognizer. The first one describes the application of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) to enforce the biosignal analysis which evolves over time with a fixed sampling period. Three different DNNs with continuous dynamics are introduced. Differential neural network (DifNN) with the capability of learning the evolution of the signal in continuous time, a time-delay neural network (TDNN) for classification is implemented to consider the time-delayed characteristics of the electrophysiological signals and a complex valued neural network (CVNN) which considered the signals to be classified may be pre-processed with a frequency analysis technique. Two different databases of diverse physiological signals are used in this study to validate the application of dynamic neural networks. A first database considers electromiographic (EMG) signals which are tested using the DifNN, TDNN and CVNN. The second database includes gait in Parkinson's disease database signals which are used in the evaluation procedure of RNN. Two validation methods are used to justify the application of dynamic ANNs as pattern recognizer for the EMG activities and the health level classification of patients suffering from Parkinson's: generalization-regularization and the k-fold cross validation. The accuracy estimation and the confusion matrix evaluation confirm the superiority of the proposed approach compared to classical feed-forward ANN pattern recognizer. The particular case of the RNN is also implemented in a 32-bits micro-controller embedded device.