Diagnosis of neuromuscular disorders based on anatomy and physiology

The purpose of an EMG examination is to describe the localization, the severity and the type of the patient´s neuromuscular lesions. The severity and type is usually inferred from the changes in the electrical activity recorded from muscles and nerves, and the anatomical distribution of the changes provides clues for the localization of the lesions. Computers have established their usefulness for signal processing tasks as filtering, averaging, and the analysis of interference patterns or of single motor unit activity. The author reports on some attempts to use certain types of computer programs, often referred to as expert systems or knowledge-based systems, in the process that conceptually follows the signal processing: the planning and execution of the diagnostic process