Discrimination and Characterization of Parkinsonian Rest Tremors by Analyzing Long-Term Correlations and Multifractal Signatures

Detection of Parkinson's disease using nocturnal breathing signals based on multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a highly prevalent neurodegenerative disorder that poses a significant challenge in terms of accurate and cost-effective diagnosis. This study focuses on the use of fractal features derived from nocturnal breathing signals to diagnose PD. Our study includes 49 individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD group), 49 relatively healthy individuals without PD (HC group), 49 individuals without PD but with other diseases (NoPD group), as well as 12 additional PD patients and 200 healthy individuals for testing. Using multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis, we extracted fractal features from nocturnal breathing signals, with logistic regression models applied to diagnose PD, as demonstrated in receiver operating characteristic curves. Eight fractal features show significant diagnostic potential for PD, including generalized Hurst exponents for the Airflow, Thorax, and Abdomen signals and the multifractal spectrum width of the SaO2 signal. Finally, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of the training data set of the PD and HC groups for all four signals is 0.911, and the AUC of the testing data set is 0.929. These results demonstrate the potential of this work to enhance the accuracy of PD diagnosis in clinical settings.

Data-Driven Prediction of Freezing of Gait Events From Stepping Data

Freezing of gait (FoG) is typically a symptom of advanced Parkinson's disease (PD) that negatively influences the quality of life and is often resistant to pharmacological interventions. Novel treatment options that make use of auditory or sensory cues might be optimized by prediction of freezing events. These predictions might help to trigger external sensory cues—shown to improve walking performance—when behavior is changed in a manner indicative of an impending freeze (i.e., when the user needs it the most), rather than delivering cue information continuously. A data-driven approach is proposed for predicting freezing events using Random Forrest (RF), Neural Network (NN), and Naive Bayes (NB) classifiers. Vertical forces, sampled at 100 Hz from a force platform were collected from 9 PD subjects as they stepped in place until they at least had one freezing episode or for 90 s. The F1 scores of RF/NN/NB algorithms were computed for different IL (input to the machine learning algorithm), and GL (how early the freezing event is predicted). A significant negative correlation between the F1 scores and GL, highlighting the difficulty of early detection is found. The IL that maximized the F1 score is approximately equal to 1.13 s. This indicates that the physiological (and therefore neurological) changes leading to freezing take effect at-least one step before the freezing incident. Our algorithm has the potential to support the development of devices to detect and then potentially prevent freezing events in people with Parkinson's which might occur if left uncorrected.

Machine Learning's Application in Deep Brain Stimulation for Parkinson's Disease: A Review

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a surgical treatment for advanced Parkinson's disease (PD) that has undergone technological evolution that parallels an expansion in clinical phenotyping, neurophysiology, and neuroimaging of the disease state. Machine learning (ML) has been successfully used in a wide range of healthcare problems, including DBS. As computational power increases and more data become available, the application of ML in DBS is expected to grow. We review the literature of ML in DBS and discuss future opportunities for such applications. Specifically, we perform a comprehensive review of the literature from PubMed, the Institute for Scientific Information's Web of Science, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) Xplore Digital Library for ML applications in DBS. These studies are broadly placed in the following categories: (1) DBS candidate selection; (2) programming optimization; (3) surgical targeting; and (4) insights into DBS mechanisms. For each category, we provide and contextualize the current body of research and discuss potential future directions for the application of ML in DBS.