A Survey of Artificial Intelligence in Gait-Based Neurodegenerative Disease Diagnosis

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent AI-based methods for diagnosing neurodegenerative diseases through gait analysis, highlighting advancements, challenges, and future prospects in the field.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive taxonomy, quality evaluation criteria, and an extensive review of 169 studies on AI-driven gait analysis for neurodegenerative disease diagnosis.

Findings

AI models enable automatic gait analysis for NDs detection

Systematic taxonomy of gait data and AI models is proposed

Future directions include 3D skeleton data and more efficient AI models

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed an increasing global population affected by neurodegenerative diseases (NDs), which traditionally require extensive healthcare resources and human effort for medical diagnosis and monitoring. As a crucial disease-related motor symptom, human gait can be exploited to characterize different NDs. The current advances in artificial intelligence (AI) models enable automatic gait analysis for NDs identification and classification, opening a new avenue to facilitate faster and more cost-effective diagnosis of NDs. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on recent progress of machine learning and deep learning based AI techniques applied to diagnosis of five typical NDs through gait. We provide an overview of the process of AI-assisted NDs diagnosis, and present a systematic taxonomy of existing gait data and AI models. Meanwhile, a novel quality evaluation criterion is proposed to quantitatively assess the quality of existing studies. Through an extensive review and analysis of 169 studies, we present recent technical advancements, discuss existing challenges, potential solutions, and future directions in this field. Finally, we envision the prospective utilization of 3D skeleton data for human gait representation and the development of more efficient AI models for NDs diagnosis.