The Relationship between Electrovestibulography and Parkinson's Disease Severity

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second largest neurodegenerative disorder worldwide. This disease results from the loss of dopamine producing neurons in parts of the basal ganglia of the brain. Previous studies have shown the involvement of the dopamine system in the basal ganglia in balance control. Sensations of balance in the body are detected by the vestibular apparatus. In this project, electrovestibulography (EVestG) has been used to measure neuronal activity of the vestibular apparatus and nuclei from Parkinson's patients. A wavelet based signal processing technique, a neural event extraction routine, has been used to extract biomarkers from these EVestG recordings. These measurements appear to be correlated with scores from mobility tests which indicate disease progression and mobility impairment in Parkinson's patients.