Electrical impedance myography (EIM) is a novel, noninvasive, and painless technique for quantitatively assessing muscle health as well as disease status and progression. The preparatory work for commercial adhesive electrodes used in previous EIM measurements is tedious, as the electrodes need to be cut, repeatedly applied, and removed. Moreover, the electrode distances need to be measured many times. To overcome these problems, we developed a convenient and practical handheld EIM probe for assessing carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) in the small hand muscles. To reduce the electrode-skin contact impedance (ESCI), the micropillared and microholed stainless steel electrodes (SSEs) contained in the probe were fabricated using a laser processing technique. When covered with saline, these electrodes showed lower ESCIs than a smooth SSE and Ag/AgCl electrode. The probe was shown to have excellent test-retest reproducibility in both healthy subjects and CTS patients, with intraclass correlation coefficients exceeding 0.975. The reactance and phase values of the abductor pollicis brevis (affected muscle) for CTS patients were consistently lower than those for healthy subjects, with a 50-kHz difference of 37.1% (p < 0.001) and 31.0% (p < 0.001), respectively. Further, no significant differences were detected in the case of the abductor digiti minimi (unaffected muscle). These results indicate that EIM has considerable potential for CTS assessment and hence merits further investigation.
Keywords: Handheld probe; Microstructures; Muscle impedance; Neuromuscular assessment.