A Dual-Modal Attention-Enhanced Deep Learning Network for Quantification of Parkinson’s Disease Characteristics

It is well known that most patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) have different degree of movement disorders, such as shuffling, festination and akinetic episodes, which could degenerate the life quality of PD patients. Therefore, it is very useful to develop a computerized tool to provide an objective evaluation of PD patients' gait. In this study, we implemented a novel gait evaluating approach to provide not only a binary classification of PD gaits and normal walking, but also a quantification of the PD gaits to relate them to the PD severity level. The proposed system is a dual-modal deep-learning-based model, where left and right gait is modeled separately by a convolutional neural network (CNN) followed by an attention-enhanced long short-term memory (LSTM) network. The left and right samples for model training and testing were segmented sequentially from multiple 1D vertical ground reaction force (VGRF) signals according to the detected gait cycle. Experimental results indicate that our model can provide state-of-the-art performance in terms of classification accuracy. It is expected that the proposed model can be a useful gait assistance to provide a quantitative evaluation of PD gaits with high confidence and accuracy if trained suitably.