In this paper, we present a novel muscle synergy extraction method based on multivariate curve resolution–alternating least squares (MCR-ALS) to overcome the limitation of the nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) method for extracting non-sparse muscle synergy, and we study its potential application for evaluating motor function of stroke survivors. Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is the most widely used method for muscle synergy extraction. However, NMF is susceptible to components’ sparseness and usually provides inferior reliability, which significantly limits the promotion of muscle synergy. In this study, MCR-ALS was employed to extract muscle synergy from electromyography (EMG) data. Its performance was compared with two other matrix factorization algorithms, NMF and self-modeling mixture analysis (SMMA). Simulated data sets were utilized to explore the influences of the sparseness and noise on the extracted synergies. As a result, the synergies estimated by MCR-ALS were the most similar to true synergies as compared with SMMA and NMF. MCR-ALS was used to analyze the muscle synergy characteristics of upper limb movements performed by healthy (n = 11) and stroke (n = 5) subjects. The repeatability and intra-subject consistency were used to evaluate the performance of MCR-ALS. As a result, MCR-ALS provided much higher repeatability and intra-subject consistency as compared with NMF, which were important for the reliability of the motor function evaluation. The stroke subjects had lower intra-subject consistency and seemingly had more synergies as compared with the healthy subjects. Thus, MCR-ALS is a promising muscle synergy analysis method for motor function evaluation of stroke patients.

Muscle synergy is an important approach to evaluate motor function for patients with neurological diseases. Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is the most widely used muscle synergy extraction method from electromyography (EMG) data. However, NMF usually falls into local optimum and is susceptible to noise, which significantly limit the promotion of muscle synergy. In this paper, a reliable synergy extraction method based on multivariate curve resolution-alternating least squares (MCRALS) was put forward. Its performance was compared with NMF through analyzing the EMG data of upper limb motor. The repeatability and intra-subject consistency were used to evaluate the two methods. As a result, MCR-ALS provided unique resolution result and better repeatability and consistency in contrast to NMF. Thus, the results of this study are of significance for the expansion and application of muscle synergy in medicine.