A Knowledge-Driven Framework Discovers Brain ACtivation-Transition-Spectrum (ACTS) Features for Parkinson’s Disease

Dopaminergic treatment has proved effective to Parkinson’s disease (PD), but the conventional treatment assessment is human-administered and prone to intra- and inter-assessor variability. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-driven framework and discover that brain ACtivation-Transition-Spectrum (ACTS) features achieve effective quantified assessments of dopaminergic therapy in PD. Firstly, brain activities of fifty-one PD patients during clinical walking tests under the OFF and ON states (without and with dopaminergic medication) were measured with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Then, brain ACTS features were formulated based on the medication-induced variations in temporal features of brain regional activation, transition features of brain hemodynamic states, and graph spectrum of brain functional connectivity. Afterwards, a prior selection algorithm was constructed based on recursive feature elimination and graph spectrum analysis for the selection of principal discriminative features. Further, linear discriminant analysis was conducted to predict the treatment-induced improvements. The results demonstrated that the proposed method decreased the misclassification probability from 42% to 16% in the evaluations of dopaminergic treatment and outperformed existing fNIRS-based methods. Therefore, the proposed method promises a quantified and objective approach for dopaminergic treatment assessment, and our brain ACTS features may serve as promising functional biomarkers for treatment evaluation.