Biosignal pattern recognition and interpretation systems. 4. Review of applications

Applications in the engineering literature of pattern analysis to biomedical signals (electrophysiological (muscle, nerve, and heart) and biomechanical) are presented. The signals include EEG, EMG, ECG and blood pressure. Feature selection techniques often use: 1) thresholding or 2) reasoning with uncertainty. Many pattern analysis systems are only partial systems: they perform stages of pattern recognition or pattern interpretation, but they are not complete systems. Several general trends can be observed: usually, but not always, statistical, syntactic, and connectionist techniques are used for pattern recognition, and statistical and symbolic techniques are used for pattern interpretation. Often, single time series are analyzed (rather than multichannel data). Descriptions of shape are important to pattern analysis at the feature, property, and recognizer (classification, discrimination, detection, and parameter estimation) stages. Typically, statistical techniques are used at various stages of pattern recognition, which assume (perhaps incorrectly) Gaussian distributions.<>