Automated Extraction and Meta-Analysis of a Century of Motor-Unit Research with NeuromechaniX

Abstract

The scientific literature on human motor units and electromyography (EMG) spans over a century (1925-2025), comprising research impossible to synthesize manually. We introduce NeuromechaniX, a domain-specific platform for automated extraction and meta-analysis of this literature. The core component, MUscraper, is a large language model pipeline that extracts approximately 200 structured metadata fields, organized into 17 major sections spanning participant demographics, EMG acquisition parameters, muscle identification, task protocols, decomposition methods, and motor-unit outcomes, from [~]2,000 publications on human limb muscles. This automated extraction transforms heterogeneous narrative reports into a standardized, queryable database at a scale not achievable through manual review. From this dataset, we analyzed motor-unit discharge rate across 208 studies examining seven muscles. Our analyses reveal that discharge rates differ significantly among muscles (p<0.001), with biceps brachii exhibiting the highest rates (15.9 pps), followed by first dorsal interosseous (13.7 pps) and tibialis anterior (13.5 pps), whereas gastrocnemius (11.3 pps), the vastii muscles (11.5 pps) and soleus show the lowest rates (9.9 pps). Sex-stratified analysis shows females exhibit higher discharge rates than males (14.5 vs 11.9 pps; Cohens d=0.38, p=0.018). In contrast, age-stratified analysis reveals non-significant differences between young and older adults (d=-0.24, p=0.072). Collectively, these results show that current views of human motor units are limited to a few muscles, with little data on females and older adults. The complete structured database is available through an open-access interactive platform (https://neuro-mechanix.com/metadata), enabling researchers to explore, filter, and download the extracted metadata. NeuromechaniX provides infrastructure for large-scale meta-research, identification of literature gaps, and hypothesis generation for the neuromechanics community.