Gait disorder classification based on effective feature selection and unsupervised methodology

Abstract

In gait stability analysis, patients suffering from dysfunction problems are impacted by shifts in their dynamic balance. Monitoring the patients' progress is important for allowing physicians and patients to observe the rehabilitation process accurately. In this study, we designed a new methodology for classifying gait disorders to quantify patients' progress. The dataset in this study includes 84 measurements of 37 patients based on a physician's opinion. In this study, the system, which includes a Kinect camera to observe and store the frames of patients walking down a hallway, a key-point detector to detect the skeletal key points, and an encoder transformer classifier network integrated with generator-discriminator networks (ET-GD), is designed to evaluate the classification of gait dysfunction. The detector extracts the skeletal key points of patients. After feature engineering, the selected high-level features are fed into the proposed neural network to analyse patient movement and perform the final evaluation of gait dysfunction. The proposed network is inspired by the 1D encoder transformer, which is integrated with two main networks: a network for classification and a network to generate fake output data similar to the input data. Furthermore, we used a discriminator structure to distinguish between the actual data (input) and fake data (generated data). Due to the multi-structural networks in the proposed method, multi-loss functions need to be optimised; this increases the accuracy of the encoder transformer classifier.

Keywords: Autoencoder; Classification; Deep learning; Discriminator; Gait disorders; Vision transformer.