Free, open, and built on real signals
EMG Academy is a free, graduate-level course in electromyography and nerve conduction studies, created for neurology and physiatry residents, clinical neurophysiology fellows, and neurodiagnostic technologists — and open to anyone who wants to understand how electrodiagnostic medicine works. There is no account, no paywall, and no tracking.
How the course is built
Two kinds of interactive content appear throughout. We are deliberate about which is which, because the distinction matters scientifically:
- Real EMG data — genuine human needle-EMG recordings. When you scroll, zoom, measure, or listen to a trace tagged REAL EMG DATA, you are interacting with actual microvolt recordings, not a drawing.
- Live models — biophysical simulations integrated in real time in your browser (for example, the Hodgkin–Huxley membrane is a numerical solution of the original differential equations). These are tagged LIVE MODEL and are built on real physiological parameters, but they are simulations, not patient recordings.
Data sources & attribution
The real recordings come from PhysioNet — Examples of Electromyograms (emgdb v1.0.0), Open Data Commons license. They are concentric-needle recordings from the tibialis anterior, sampled at 4 kHz:
No history of neuromuscular disease
Myopathy — long-standing polymyositis (steroids, low-dose methotrexate)
Chronic neuropathy from a right L5 radiculopathy
The dataset is distributed by PhysioNet under the Open Data Commons Attribution License. If you use these recordings, please cite both the original dataset and PhysioNet:
Goldberger AL, et al. PhysioBank, PhysioToolkit, and PhysioNet. Circulation. 2000;101(23):e215–e220.
Methodology & references
Lesson content follows standard electrodiagnostic references — Preston & Shapiro's Electromyography and Neuromuscular Disorders, Kimura's Electrodiagnosis in Diseases of Nerve and Muscle, Dumitru's Electrodiagnostic Medicine, and AANEM practice resources — with primary literature cited per lesson.
A note on technology
Every waveform, oscilloscope, and model on this site is rendered on the HTML5 canvas — there is no SVG anywhere in the application. Real signals are loaded as raw 16-bit samples and converted to millivolts in the browser; audio playback uses the Web Audio API to reproduce the actual recording. The site is a static Next.js application hosted on Vercel.
This material is for education and is not medical advice. It is not a substitute for supervised clinical training, institutional protocols, or professional judgment. Electrodiagnostic studies are invasive procedures that must be performed by, or under the supervision of, qualified clinicians.