Detection of statistically significant differences in cat jaw muscle movement using the EMG linear envelope

A study of jaw movement in the cat using experimental protocols to elicit biting and hissing responses is discussed. The EMG was recorded and its morphology was characterized by employing preprocessing and pattern analysis techniques for feature extraction. Time series electromyographic (EMG) episodes were conditioned by reduction to 40 representative sample points (approximating the EMG linear envelope), aligning, and taking the Karhuenen-Loeve expansion. To test the hypothesis that biting and hissing responses were reproducible, and yet statistically different from each other, the F test was used to determine the significance of differences in standard deviation of the KLE eigenvectors. It was found that jaw movement was significantly different for biting versus hissing protocols