RGB-D Videos-Based Early Prediction of Infant Cerebral Palsy via General Movements Complexity

Early detection and intervention of cerebral palsy can promote neural remodeling in the process of brain development, thus reducing the negative effects of cerebral palsy. In this paper, we proposed a novel method for early prediction of infant cerebral palsy based on General Movements Assessment (GMA) theory with RGB-D videos. Firstly, we explored the human pose recognition in supine position based on RGB-D videos. Then we further apply it to auto-GMA. Specifically, we employ current pose estimation method on RGB images to achieve the infant full body 2D key points. By combining the depth information, the 3D movement of infant in supine position can be obtained. Then the infant's movement complexity index is achieved by extracting the infant's whole-body movement characteristic. In order to verify the effectiveness of the method, we did some experiments on a public dataset consisting 12 real recorded infants' movement RGB-D videos, with 4 of the samples were diagnosed as abnormal infants by a GMA expert. We use expert GMA ratings of these recorded movements as the gold standard. Our method achieved state-of-the-art with sensitivity of 100%, specificity of 87.5%, and accuracy of 91.7%. The results show that the method has great potential in assisting doctors in diagnose infant cerebral palsy.