Katherine Lawler

Renjie Li, Chun Yu Lao, Rebecca St. George et al.

Objective The coordination of human movement directly reflects function of the central nervous system. Small deficits in movement are often the first sign of an underlying neurological problem. The objective of this research is to develop a new end-to-end, deep learning-based system, Rapid-Motion-Track (RMT) that can track the fastest human movement accurately when webcams or laptop cameras are used. Materials and Methods We applied RMT to finger tapping, a well-validated test of motor control that is one of the most challenging human motions to track with computer vision due to the small keypoints of digits and the high velocities that are generated. We recorded 160 finger tapping assessments simultaneously with a standard 2D laptop camera (30 frames/sec) and a high-speed wearable sensor-based 3D motion tracking system (250 frames/sec). RMT and a range of DLC models were applied to the video data with tapping frequencies up to 8Hz to extract movement features. Results The movement features (e.g. speed, rhythm, variance) identified with the new RMT system exhibited very high concurrent validity with the gold-standard measurements (97.3\% of RMT measures were within +/-0.5Hz of the Optotrak measures), and outperformed DLC and other advanced computer vision tools (around 88.2\% of DLC measures were within +/-0.5Hz of the Optotrak measures). RMT also accurately tracked a range of other rapid human movements such as foot tapping, head turning and sit-to -stand movements. Conclusion: With the ubiquity of video technology in smart devices, the RMT method holds potential to transform access and accuracy of human movement assessment.

Renjie Li, Son Tran, Saurabh Garg et al.

Keypoint detection plays an important role in a wide range of applications. However, predicting keypoints of small objects such as human hands is a challenging problem. Recent works fuse feature maps of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), either via multi-level feature integration or multi-resolution aggregation. Despite achieving some success, the feature fusion approaches increase the complexity and the opacity of CNNs. To address this issue, we propose a novel CNN model named Multi-Scale Deep Supervision Network (P-MSDSNet) that learns feature maps at different scales with deep supervisions to produce attention maps for adaptive feature propagation from layers to layers. P-MSDSNet has a multi-stage architecture which makes it scalable while its deep supervision with spatial attention improves transparency to the feature learning at each stage. We show that P-MSDSNet outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on benchmark datasets while requiring fewer number of parameters. We also show the application of P-MSDSNet to quantify finger tapping hand movements in a neuroscience study.

Renjie Li, Xinyi Wang, Katherine Lawler et al.

With populations ageing, the number of people with dementia worldwide is expected to triple to 152 million by 2050. Seventy percent of cases are due to Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology and there is a 10-20 year 'pre-clinical' period before significant cognitive decline occurs. We urgently need, cost effective, objective methods to detect AD, and other dementias, at an early stage. Risk factor modification could prevent 40% of cases and drug trials would have greater chances of success if participants are recruited at an earlier stage. Currently, detection of dementia is largely by pen and paper cognitive tests but these are time consuming and insensitive to pre-clinical phases. Specialist brain scans and body fluid biomarkers can detect the earliest stages of dementia but are too invasive or expensive for widespread use. With the advancement of technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI) shows promising results in assisting with detection of early-stage dementia. Existing AI-aided methods and potential future research directions are reviewed and discussed.