Analysis of movement patterns aids the early detection of Parkinson's disease

Abstract

The movement patterns are characteristic for a person. The changes in hidher movement patterns indicate changes in hidher state. Several diseases result in well distinguishable deviation from normal movement patterns. The deviation starts with subtle changes, our aim is to detect these changes and thus aid the early diagnosis of neurological diseases. We have been using a passive marker based motion analyzer (PRIMAS) to record the movement patterns defined by neurologists. Healthy subjects and Parkinsonian patients participated in the tests. We suggest a measurement set-up and evaluation algorithms that fit to the movement patterns to be analyzed.

Analysis of finger-tapping movement

“…Volkow et al (1998) found a strong correlation between dopamine D2 receptors and the motor task characterized by the finger-tapping test. Quantifying impairments in Parkinson's disease, however, is difficult (Rao et al, 2003), and Muir et al (1995) and Jobbágy et al (1997) used the tapping test to estimate the severity of motor symptoms in this disease.…”

Does This Patient Have Parkinson Disease?

“…The pinching and circling test is a sequence of 6 movements: pinching (opposing thumb and index finger) with the right hand and then with the left hand; circling (rotating the hand in a circle) with the right hand and then with the left hand; pinching with the right hand while simultaneously circling with the left; and pinching with the left hand while simultaneously circling with the right (FIGURE 1). Jobbagy et al 27 were able to quantify the performance of patients on these tasks using a motion analyzer, although a specific threshold "score" to define bradykinesia was not determined. However, poor performance of these maneuvers is easily detectable and clinicians can use them to confirm the presence of bradykinesia subjectively.…”

Supporting movement pattern queries in user-specified scales

“…In image processing, researchers model movement patterns of real objects and study techniques to automate the recognition of moving objects and their movements from video [14], [5]. In medical science, researchers use passive marker based movement analyzers, such as the Precision Image-based Movement Analysis System developed at Delft University of Technology, to record the movement of human or animal objects, and analyze their movement patterns [9], [10]. In contrast to this paper, these studies focus on the analysis of individual object.…”

“…Moving objects are usually physical, such as human bodies or organisms studied in the medical sciences [9] and flying missiles in military applications. They can also be conceptual, such as financial indices studied in technical market analysis [6] (the financial indices are taken as objects and their values as their one-dimensional positions).…”