Diagnosis of generalized joint hypermobility with gait patterns using a deep neural network

Abstract

Generalized joint hypermobility (GJH) describes the situation that the range of joint motion exceeds the normal range. GJH is found to increase the risk of knee-related injury and osteoarthritis, challenging the athletic ability of the population. Gait signals are directly related to hip and knee athletic conditions, and have been shown to have significant changes with GJH by our previous research. But gait data are noisy, and vary with age, gender, weight, and ethnicity, which makes them hard to analyze with traditional statistical methods. In this study, we proposed an end-to-end deep learning model to recognize the patterns of the gait signals. The model consists of convolutional network blocks, residual network blocks, and attention blocks. Our dataset is composed of 452 samples of gait data obtained by a three-dimension motion capture system, with the six-degree-of-freedom kinematic data of hip, knee, and ankle joints during level walking, downhill, and uphill walking. The model achieves 95.77% accuracy and 98.68% specificity with a recall of 76.84% while is more efficient than traditional machine learning methods. The trained model can be run on economical friendly devices, and provide help for immediate and precise diagnosis of GJH. It is also meaningful to consider its application in large-scale GJH screening, which can contribute to sports medicine.

Keywords: Attention mechanism; Deep learning; Gait; Generalized joint hypermobility.