Automatic Detection Pipeline for Accessing the Motor Severity of Parkinson’s Disease in Finger Tapping and Postural Stability

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a nervous disorder that can cause motor impairment. PD severity assessment based on a series of motor movements illustrated in Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) is an important part of clinical PD diagnosis. However, the current quantifying method heavily relies on human observation, which is time-consuming and subjective. Therefore, automatic severity estimation stemming from machine learning methods is receiving an increasing amount of research attention. However, these advances are still limited by data availability and interpretability. In this paper, we release a large PD motor dataset of over 300 real PD patients collected under doctors’ instructions and propose a pipeline to automatically quantify the motor severity of PD in finger tapping and postural stability. These two selected movements are representative of local and global motor control, exhibiting great clinical importance. The pipeline contains three-stage: pose estimation, domain knowledge extraction, and classification stage. The pose estimation uses deep-learning-based methods to extract 21 and 17 key points for finger tapping and postural stability respectively. The domain knowledge extraction stage extracts several explicit features pre-defined by experienced neuro-physicians. Finally, a classifier is trained to infer PD severity under MDS-UPDRS. To combine deep-learning-based features from pose estimation and domain features from the expert, the pipeline achieves a better trade-off between the model efficiency and clinical interpretability. Experiments show that our method achieves a micro average f1-score of 88%, 84%, and 84%, respectively on left finger tapping, right finger tapping, and postural stability, outperforming previous methods by a large margin. In addition, involving expert knowledge in the feature extraction stage greatly improves our model’s interpretability, which is essential in automatic PD detection.