Interpretable Features for the Assessment of Neurodegenerative Diseases through Handwriting Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Thebaud, Thomas, Favaro, Anna, Chen, Casey, Chavez, Gabrielle, Moro-Velazquez, Laureano, Butala, Ankur, Dehak, Najim
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Thebaud, Thomas
Favaro, Anna
Chen, Casey
Chavez, Gabrielle
Moro-Velazquez, Laureano
Butala, Ankur
Dehak, Najim
author_facet Thebaud, Thomas
Favaro, Anna
Chen, Casey
Chavez, Gabrielle
Moro-Velazquez, Laureano
Butala, Ankur
Dehak, Najim
contents Motor dysfunction is a common sign of neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) such as Parkinson's disease (PD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD), but may be difficult to detect, especially in the early stages. In this work, we examine the behavior of a wide array of interpretable features extracted from the handwriting signals of 113 subjects performing multiple tasks on a digital tablet, as part of the Neurological Signals dataset. The aim is to measure their effectiveness in characterizing NDs, including AD and PD. To this end, task-agnostic and task-specific features are extracted from 14 distinct tasks. Subsequently, through statistical analysis and a series of classification experiments, we investigate which features provide greater discriminative power between NDs and healthy controls and amongst different NDs. Preliminary results indicate that the tasks at hand can all be effectively leveraged to distinguish between the considered set of NDs, specifically by measuring the stability, the speed of writing, the time spent not writing, and the pressure variations between groups from our handcrafted interpretable features, which shows a statistically significant difference between groups, across multiple tasks. Using various binary classification algorithms on the computed features, we obtain up to 87% accuracy for the discrimination between AD and healthy controls (CTL), and up to 69% for the discrimination between PD and CTL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_08303
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Interpretable Features for the Assessment of Neurodegenerative Diseases through Handwriting Analysis
Thebaud, Thomas
Favaro, Anna
Chen, Casey
Chavez, Gabrielle
Moro-Velazquez, Laureano
Butala, Ankur
Dehak, Najim
Neurons and Cognition
Machine Learning
Motor dysfunction is a common sign of neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) such as Parkinson's disease (PD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD), but may be difficult to detect, especially in the early stages. In this work, we examine the behavior of a wide array of interpretable features extracted from the handwriting signals of 113 subjects performing multiple tasks on a digital tablet, as part of the Neurological Signals dataset. The aim is to measure their effectiveness in characterizing NDs, including AD and PD. To this end, task-agnostic and task-specific features are extracted from 14 distinct tasks. Subsequently, through statistical analysis and a series of classification experiments, we investigate which features provide greater discriminative power between NDs and healthy controls and amongst different NDs. Preliminary results indicate that the tasks at hand can all be effectively leveraged to distinguish between the considered set of NDs, specifically by measuring the stability, the speed of writing, the time spent not writing, and the pressure variations between groups from our handcrafted interpretable features, which shows a statistically significant difference between groups, across multiple tasks. Using various binary classification algorithms on the computed features, we obtain up to 87% accuracy for the discrimination between AD and healthy controls (CTL), and up to 69% for the discrimination between PD and CTL.
title Interpretable Features for the Assessment of Neurodegenerative Diseases through Handwriting Analysis
topic Neurons and Cognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08303