Automated machine vision enabled detection of movement disorders from hand drawn spirals
This provides a low-cost, objective diagnostic tool for movement disorders, addressing misdiagnosis issues in clinical settings where digital equipment is unaffordable.
The study tackled the problem of subjective and biased diagnosis of Parkinson's disease and Essential tremor from hand-drawn spirals by developing an automated system using scanned drawings and a CNN, achieving 98.2% accuracy in discriminating PD from controls and 92% accuracy in discriminating PD from ET and controls.
A widely used test for the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease (PD) and Essential tremor (ET) is hand-drawn shapes,where the analysis is observationally performed by the examining neurologist. This method is subjective and is prone to bias amongst different physicians. Due to the similarities in the symptoms of the two diseases, they are often misdiagnosed.Studies which attempt to automate the process typically use digitized input, where the tablet or specialized equipment are not affordable in many clinical settings. This study uses a dataset of scanned pen and paper drawings and a convolutional neural network (CNN) to perform classification between PD, ET and control subjects. The discrimination accuracy of PD from controls was 98.2%. The discrimination accuracy of PD from ET and from controls was 92%. An ablation study was conducted and indicated that correct hyper parameter optimization can increases the accuracy up to 4.33%. Finally, the study indicates the viability of using a CNN-enabled machine vision system to provide robust and accurate detection of movement disorders from hand drawn spirals.