Sitikantha Roy

Shah Pallav Dhanendrakumar, Saikat Pal, Sitikantha Roy

Advances in computational modeling, neuroimaging, and artificial intelligence are revolutionizing the modeling of neurological disorders for improved diagnostics, prognosis, and treatment planning. Mechanistic models provide valuable scientific insight into the disorders, but in practice they are often simplified with assumptions or computationally expensive and slow to solve. However, while purely data driven approaches provide speed and scalability, they require large, high quality data to train and generally suffer from interpretability and generalization issues. This perspective paper presents a structured overview of hybrid modeling strategies, which combine deep learning models with physics based solvers, and are categorized into parallel, series, and parallel-series architectures. Three main approaches that have been emphasized are residual modeling for missing or incomplete physics, Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) for continuous time dynamics approximation, and solver in the loop that accelerates traditional solvers with neural approximations. These hybrid models integrate the governing differential equation based formulations and deep learning to characterize the evolution of neurological disorders, and promise advanced personalized neurological modeling. In addition, the study explores and proposes different hybrid configurations to improve diagnosis accuracy, predict disease progression, and inform treatment strategies across a range of neurological disorders. These capabilities outperform standalone mechanistic or purely data driven approaches, making hybrid modeling a powerful tool, especially in applications involving modeling the progression and treatment responses in neurological conditions such as brain tumors, Alzheimer's disease, and stroke.

Rajnish Kumar, Anand Gupta, Suriya Prakash Muthukrishnan et al.

Exoskeletons and rehabilitation systems have the potential to improve human strength and recovery by using adaptive human-machine interfaces. Achieving precise and responsive control in these systems depends on accurately estimating joint movement dynamics, such as joint angle, velocity, acceleration, external mass, and torque. While machine learning (ML) approaches have been employed to predict joint kinematics from surface electromyography (sEMG) data, traditional ML models often struggle to generalize across dynamic movements. In contrast, physics-informed neural networks integrate biomechanical principles, but their effectiveness in predicting full movement dynamics has not been thoroughly explored. To address this, we introduce the Physics-informed Gated Recurrent Network (PiGRN), a novel model designed to predict multi-joint movement dynamics from sEMG data. PiGRN uses a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) to process time-series sEMG inputs, estimate multi-joint kinematics and external loads, and predict joint torque while incorporating physics-based constraints during training. Experimental validation, using sEMG data from five participants performing elbow flexion-extension tasks with 0 kg, 2 kg, and 4 kg loads, showed that PiGRN accurately predicted joint torques for 10 novel movements. RMSE values ranged from 4.02\% to 11.40\%, with correlation coefficients between 0.87 and 0.98. These results underscore PiGRN's potential for real-time applications in exoskeletons and rehabilitation. Future work will focus on expanding datasets, improving musculoskeletal models, and investigating unsupervised learning approaches.

Rajnish Kumar, Suriya Prakash Muthukrishnan, Lalan Kumar et al.

In this research, we present an innovative method known as a physics-informed neural network (PINN) model to predict multi-joint kinematics using electromyography (EMG) signals recorded from the muscles surrounding these joints across various loads. The primary aim is to simultaneously predict both the shoulder and elbow joint angles while executing elbow flexion-extension (FE) movements, especially under varying load conditions. The PINN model is constructed by combining a feed-forward Artificial Neural Network (ANN) with a joint torque computation model. During the training process, the model utilizes a custom loss function derived from an inverse dynamics joint torque musculoskeletal model, along with a mean square angle loss. The training dataset for the PINN model comprises EMG and time data collected from four different subjects. To assess the model's performance, we conducted a comparison between the predicted joint angles and experimental data using a testing data set. The results demonstrated strong correlations of 58% to 83% in joint angle prediction. The findings highlight the potential of incorporating physical principles into the model, not only increasing its versatility but also enhancing its accuracy. The findings could have significant implications for the precise estimation of multi-joint kinematics in dynamic scenarios, particularly concerning the advancement of human-machine interfaces (HMIs) for exoskeletons and prosthetic control systems.

Rajnish Kumar, Tapas Tripura, Souvik Chakraborty et al.

Electromyography (EMG)--based computational musculoskeletal modeling is a non-invasive method for studying musculotendon function, human movement, and neuromuscular control, providing estimates of internal variables like muscle forces and joint torques. However, EMG signals from deeper muscles are often challenging to measure by placing the surface EMG electrodes and unfeasible to measure directly using invasive methods. The restriction to the access of EMG data from deeper muscles poses a considerable obstacle to the broad adoption of EMG-driven modeling techniques. A strategic alternative is to use an estimation algorithm to approximate the missing EMG signals from deeper muscle. A similar strategy is used in physics-informed deep learning, where the features of physical systems are learned without labeled data. In this work, we propose a hybrid deep learning algorithm, namely the neural musculoskeletal model (NMM), that integrates physics-informed and data-driven deep learning to approximate the EMG signals from the deeper muscles. While data-driven modeling is used to predict the missing EMG signals, physics-based modeling engraves the subject-specific information into the predictions. Experimental verifications on five test subjects are carried out to investigate the performance of the proposed hybrid framework. The proposed NMM is validated against the joint torque computed from 'OpenSim' software. The predicted deep EMG signals are also compared against the state-of-the-art muscle synergy extrapolation (MSE) approach, where the proposed NMM completely outperforms the existing MSE framework by a significant margin.