Early Detection of Parkinson's Disease using Spiral Test and Echo State Networks

Parkinson's disease is one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative diseases in the world, usually occurring after the age of 50, but in some cases, also affects younger people. It is a disease that affects movement, coordination, and muscle control, all of which cause a range of symptoms that affect patients' writing and drawing skills. Diagnosis is clinical, so it occurs mainly through the evaluation of the patient's movements, coordination, and muscle control. Therefore, the analysis of micrographic models can introduce a new methodology of investigation in the diagnosis and monitoring of Parkinson's disease. This study proposes an approach based on artificial intelligence in combination with the spiral test, which consists in asking the patient to draw a spiral, thanks to which it is possible to make the early diagnosis of Parkinson's disease. The classification is performed with a combination of an Echo State Network and an MLP layer. To validate the approach, several classification algorithms belonging to two macro groups (boosting decision trees based) were used as baseline. The results obtained are very satisfactory with the ESN-based classifier exhibiting an F-Score of 97.8%. The very encouraging results indicate that the proposed approach may be an effective contribution to improving Parkinson's diagnostics.