Detecting Parkinson’s Disease through Gait Measures Using Machine Learning

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is one of the most common long-term degenerative movement disorders that affects the motor system. This progressive nervous system disorder affects nearly one million Americans, and more than 20,000 new cases are diagnosed each year. PD is a chronic and progressive painful neurological disorder and usually people with PD live 10 to 20 years after being diagnosed. PD is diagnosed based on the identification of motor signs of bradykinesia, rigidity, tremor, and postural instability. Though several attempts have been made to develop explicit diagnostic criteria, this is still largely unrevealed. In this manuscript, we aim to build a classifier with gait data from Parkinson patients and healthy controls using machine learning methods. The classifier could help facilitate a more accurate and cost-effective diagnostic method. The input to our algorithm is the Gait in Parkinson’s Disease dataset published on PhysioNet containing force sensor data as the measurement of gait from 92 healthy subjects and 214 patients with idiopathic Parkinson’s Disease. Different machine learning methods, including logistic regression, SVM, decision tree, KNN were tested to output a predicted classification of Parkinson patients and healthy controls. Baseline models including frequency domain method can reach similar performance and may be another good approach for the PD diagnostics.