Automated freezing of gait assessment with marker-based motion capture and multi-stage spatial-temporal graph convolutional neural networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel deep neural network architecture, MS-GCN, for automated freezing of gait assessment using motion capture data, outperforming existing models and correlating strongly with manual annotations.

Contribution

The paper proposes the MS-GCN architecture that combines spatial-temporal graph convolutional networks with multi-stage refinement for improved FOG detection.

Findings

MS-GCN outperforms four state-of-the-art baselines.

Strong correlation (r=0.93) with manual FOG assessments.

Automated method offers an objective alternative to clinician evaluations.

Abstract

Freezing of gait (FOG) is a common and debilitating gait impairment in Parkinson's disease. Further insight into this phenomenon is hampered by the difficulty to objectively assess FOG. To meet this clinical need, this paper proposes an automated motion-capture-based FOG assessment method driven by a novel deep neural network. Automated FOG assessment can be formulated as an action segmentation problem, where temporal models are tasked to recognize and temporally localize the FOG segments in untrimmed motion capture trials. This paper takes a closer look at the performance of state-of-the-art action segmentation models when tasked to automatically assess FOG. Furthermore, a novel deep neural network architecture is proposed that aims to better capture the spatial and temporal dependencies than the state-of-the-art baselines. The proposed network, termed multi-stage spatial-temporal graph convolutional network (MS-GCN), combines the spatial-temporal graph convolutional network (ST-GCN) and the multi-stage temporal convolutional network (MS-TCN). The ST-GCN captures the hierarchical spatial-temporal motion among the joints inherent to motion capture, while the multi-stage component reduces over-segmentation errors by refining the predictions over multiple stages. The experiments indicate that the proposed model outperforms four state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, FOG outcomes derived from MS-GCN predictions had an excellent (r=0.93 [0.87, 0.97]) and moderately strong (r=0.75 [0.55, 0.87]) linear relationship with FOG outcomes derived from manual annotations. The proposed MS-GCN may provide an automated and objective alternative to labor-intensive clinician-based FOG assessment. Future work is now possible that aims to assess the generalization of MS-GCN to a larger and more varied verification cohort.