E. Ray Dorsey

Weijian Li, Wei Zhu, E. Ray Dorsey et al.

Medication for neurological diseases such as the Parkinson's disease usually happens remotely away from hospitals. Such out-of-lab environments pose challenges in collecting timely and accurate health status data. Individual differences in behavioral signals collected from wearable sensors also lead to difficulties in adopting current general machine learning analysis pipelines. To address these challenges, we present a method for predicting the medication status of Parkinson's disease patients using the public mPower dataset, which contains 62,182 remote multi-modal test records collected on smartphones from 487 patients. The proposed method shows promising results in predicting three medication statuses objectively: Before Medication (AUC=0.95), After Medication (AUC=0.958), and Another Time (AUC=0.976) by examining patient-wise historical records with the attention weights learned through a Transformer model. Our method provides an innovative way for personalized remote health sensing in a timely and objective fashion which could benefit a broad range of similar applications.

Md Saiful Islam, Wasifur Rahman, Abdelrahman Abdelkader et al.

We present an artificial intelligence system to remotely assess the motor performance of individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD). Participants performed a motor task (i.e., tapping fingers) in front of a webcam, and data from 250 global participants were rated by three expert neurologists following the Movement Disorder Society Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS). The neurologists' ratings were highly reliable, with an intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) of 0.88. We developed computer algorithms to obtain objective measurements that align with the MDS-UPDRS guideline and are strongly correlated with the neurologists' ratings. Our machine learning model trained on these measures outperformed an MDS-UPDRS certified rater, with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.59 compared to the rater's MAE of 0.79. However, the model performed slightly worse than the expert neurologists (0.53 MAE). The methodology can be replicated for similar motor tasks, providing the possibility of evaluating individuals with PD and other movement disorders remotely, objectively, and in areas with limited access to neurological care.

Mohammad Rafayet Ali, Taylor Myers, Ellen Wagner et al.

One of the symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD) is hypomimia or reduced facial expressions. In this paper, we present a digital biomarker for PD that utilizes the study of micro-expressions. We analyzed the facial action units (AU) from 1812 videos of 604 individuals (61 with PD and 543 without PD, mean age 63.9 yo, sd 7.8 ) collected online using a web-based tool (www.parktest.net). In these videos, participants were asked to make three facial expressions (a smiling, disgusted, and surprised face) followed by a neutral face. Using techniques from computer vision and machine learning, we objectively measured the variance of the facial muscle movements and used it to distinguish between individuals with and without PD. The prediction accuracy using the facial micro-expressions was comparable to those methodologies that utilize motor symptoms. Logistic regression analysis revealed that participants with PD had less variance in AU6 (cheek raiser), AU12 (lip corner puller), and AU4 (brow lowerer) than non-PD individuals. An automated classifier using Support Vector Machine was trained on the variances and achieved 95.6% accuracy. Using facial expressions as a biomarker for PD could be potentially transformative for patients in need of physical separation (e.g., due to COVID) or are immobile.

Weijian Li, Wei Zhu, E. Ray Dorsey et al.

Parkinsons Disease is a neurological disorder and prevalent in elderly people. Traditional ways to diagnose the disease rely on in-person subjective clinical evaluations on the quality of a set of activity tests. The high-resolution longitudinal activity data collected by smartphone applications nowadays make it possible to conduct remote and convenient health assessment. However, out-of-lab tests often suffer from poor quality controls as well as irregularly collected observations, leading to noisy test results. To address these issues, we propose a novel time-series based approach to predicting Parkinson's Disease with raw activity test data collected by smartphones in the wild. The proposed method first synchronizes discrete activity tests into multimodal features at unified time points. Next, it distills and enriches local and global representations from noisy data across modalities and temporal observations by two attention modules. With the proposed mechanisms, our model is capable of handling noisy observations and at the same time extracting refined temporal features for improved prediction performance. Quantitative and qualitative results on a large public dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.