Axel Schneider

Kaja Balzereit, Malte Mechtenberg, Axel Schneider

Motor unit parameters such as the innervation zone centre or the conduction velocity of the electrical potential harbour the potential to improve the fidelity of neuromechanical models used for movement and force prediction. Determining these parameters in a non-invasive way is challenging, as they are subject-specific and may vary with muscle contraction. Existing work on the estimation of motor unit parameters mainly relies on white-box modelling and therefore requires substantial manual modelling effort. This work targets the simultaneous estimation of multiple subject-specific motor unit parameters from electromyography (EMG) recordings measured non-invasively at the skin surface. This results in an inverse problem with a nonlinear loss function. To address this problem, an informed autoencoder is developed. This autoencoder reconstructs the surface EMG recordings while learning the parameters in its latent space and adhering to physical laws that relate the parameters to the EMG signals. In experiments on synthetic data, innervation zone centres are estimated with a mean absolute error of 2.5989 $\mathrm{mm}$, and conduction velocities of the electric potential are estimated with a mean absolute error of 0.1697 $\mathrm{m}\mathrm{s}^{-1}$. These results demonstrate the plausibility of this novel approach, which enables the simultaneous estimation of several motor unit parameters while reducing manual modelling effort through the integration of data-driven machine learning.

Neevkumar Manavar, Hanno Gerd Meyer, Joachim Waßmuth et al.

Monitoring contact pressure in hospital beds is essential for preventing pressure ulcers and enabling real-time patient assessment. Current methods can predict pressure maps but often lack physical plausibility, limiting clinical reliability. This work proposes a framework that enhances plausibility via Informed Latent Space (ILS) and Weight Optimization Loss (WOL) with conditional generative modeling to produce high-fidelity, physically consistent pressure estimates. This study also applies diffusion based conditional Brownian Bridge Diffusion Model (BBDM) and proposes training strategy for its latent counterpart Latent Brownian Bridge Diffusion Model (LBBDM) tailored for pressure synthesis in lying postures. Experiment results shows proposed method improves physical plausibility and performance over baselines: BBDM with ILS delivers highly detailed maps at higher computational cost and large inference time, whereas LBBDM provides faster inference with competitive performance. Overall, the approach supports non-invasive, vision-based, real-time patient monitoring in clinical environments.