Sparse Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network for Leg Agility Assessment in Parkinson's Disease

IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng. 2020 Dec;28(12):2837-2848. doi: 10.1109/TNSRE.2020.3039297. Epub 2021 Jan 28.

Abstract

Motor disorder is a typical symptom of Parkinson's disease (PD). Neurologists assess the severity of PD motor symptoms using the clinical rating scale, i.e., MDS-UPDRS. However, this assessment method is time-consuming and easily affected by the perception difference of assessors. In the recent outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019, telemedicine for PD has become extremely urgent for clinical practice. To solve these problems, we developed an automated and objective assessment method of the leg agility task in the MDS-UPDRS using videos and a graph neural network. In this study, a sparse adaptive graph convolutional network (SA-GCN) was proposed to achieve fine-grained quantitative assessment of skeleton sequences extracted from videos. Specifically, the sparse adaptive graph convolutional unit with a prior knowledge constraint was proposed to perform adaptive spatial modeling of physical and logical dependency for skeleton sequences, thus achieving the sparse modeling of the discriminative spatial relationships. Subsequently, a temporal context module was introduced to construct the remote context dependency in the temporal dimension, hence determining the global changes of the task. A multi-domain attention learning module was also developed to integrate the static spatial features and dynamic temporal features, and then to emphasize the salient feature selection in the channel domain, thereby capturing the multi-domain fine-grained information. Finally, the evaluation results using a dataset with 148 patients and 870 samples confirmed the effectiveness and reliability of our scheme, and the method outperformed other related state-of-the-art methods. Our contactless method provides a new potential tool for automated PD assessment and telemedicine.

MeSH terms

  • Aged
  • Algorithms
  • Automation
  • COVID-19
  • Databases, Factual
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Leg / physiopathology*
  • Machine Learning
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Movement Disorders / diagnosis
  • Movement Disorders / etiology
  • Movement Disorders / physiopathology
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Parkinson Disease / complications
  • Parkinson Disease / diagnosis*
  • Parkinson Disease / physiopathology*
  • Psychomotor Performance
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Telemedicine / methods
  • Video Recording