PRESENTING A NEW DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR SCREENING PARKINSON’S DISEASE PATIENTS USING SYMLET WAVELET

Abstract

Objective: Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease that is categorized by tremor, rigidity, and bradykinesia. Currently, there is no standard method to diagnose patients with PD. One of the common symptoms of PD is gait disorders which are caused by rigid muscles. Gait disorders may start some years before disease diagnosis. Therefore, better understanding of the gait signal can lead to early diagnosis of PD. Methods: Computer-aided system has been useful in early detection of PD symptoms. In the present study, gait disturbances have received attention as potential biomarkers for early diagnosing of PD. Time and frequency analysis of gait signals together can provide more useful information. Wavelet-based features were extracted from stride, swing and double support time signals of healthy subjects and PD patients. These signals were decomposed into five levels using “sym4” wavelet. Mean and standard deviation (SD) of the absolute values of the approximation and detailed coefficients at each level were computed. Then final features were picked accordingly to obtain the best result for the classification. Results: Support Vector Machine (SVM) was employed for classification of patients and healthy people. The classifier performance was measured based on accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. The classifier performance is obtained with 93.3% accuracy employing linear kernel. Conclusions: The proposed system can be employed as a Decision Support Systems (DSSs) for early diagnosing of PD. Presenting DSSs can be employed to screen suspected cases of PD disease for further evaluation. Studying large number of patients and healthy subjects may lead to more precise study on PD. Also, it seems that using other different classifiers, along with our features, can reduce the diagnosis error.