Parkinson’s disease detection based on multi-pattern analysis and multi-scale convolutional neural networks

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a complex neurodegenerative disease. At present, the early diagnosis of PD is still extremely challenging, and there is still a lack of consensus on the brain characterization of PD, and a more efficient and robust PD detection method is urgently needed. In order to further explore the features of PD based on brain activity and achieve effective detection of PD patients (including OFF and ON medications), in this study, a multi-pattern analysis based on brain activation and brain functional connectivity was performed on the brain functional activity of PD patients, and a novel PD detection model based on multi-scale convolutional neural network (MCNN) was proposed. Based on the analysis of power spectral density (PSD) and phase-locked value (PLV) features of multiple frequency bands of two independent resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) datasets, we found that there were significant differences in PSD and PLV between HCs and PD patients (including OFF and ON medications), especially in the β and γ bands, which were very effective for PD detection. Moreover, the combined use of brain activation represented by PSD and functional connectivity patterns represented by PLV can effectively improve the performance of PD detection. Furthermore, our proposed MCNN model shows great potential for automatic PD detection, with cross-validation accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve all above 99%. Our study may help to further understand the characteristics of PD and provide new ideas for future PD diagnosis based on spontaneous EEG activity.