Assessing gait dysfunction severity in Parkinson’s Disease using 2-Stream Spatial–Temporal Neural Network

Parkinson’s Disease (PD), a neurodegenerative disorder, significantly impacts the quality of life for millions of people worldwide. PD primarily impacts dopaminergic neurons in the brain’s substantia nigra, resulting in dopamine deficiency and gait impairments such as bradykinesia and rigidity. Currently, several well-established tools, such as the Movement Disorder Society-Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) and Hoehn and Yahr (H&Y) Scale, are used for evaluating gait dysfunction in PD. While insightful, these methods are subjective, time-consuming, and often ineffective in early-stage diagnosis. Other methods using specialized sensors and equipment to measure movement disorders are cumbersome and expensive, limiting their accessibility. This study introduces a hierarchical approach to evaluating gait dysfunction in PD through videos. The novel 2-Stream Spatial–Temporal Neural Network (2S-STNN) leverages the spatial–temporal features from the skeleton and silhouette streams for PD classification. This approach achieves an accuracy rate of 89% and outperforms other state-of-the-art models. The study also employs saliency values to highlight critical body regions that significantly influence model decisions and are severely affected by the disease. For a more detailed analysis, the study investigates 21 specific gait attributes for a nuanced quantification of gait disorders. Parameters such as walking pace, step length, and neck forward angle are found to be strongly correlated with PD gait severity categories. This approach offers a comprehensive and convenient solution for PD management in clinical settings, enabling patients to receive a more precise evaluation and monitoring of their gait impairments.