1D-convolutional transformer for Parkinson disease diagnosis from gait

This paper presents an efficient deep neural network model for diagnosing Parkinson’s disease from gait. More specifically, we introduce a hybrid ConvNet-Transformer architecture to accurately diagnose the disease by detecting the severity stage. The proposed architecture exploits the strengths of both convolutional neural networks and Transformers in a single end-to-end model, where the former is able to extract relevant local features from Vertical Ground Reaction Force (VGRF) signal, while the latter allows to capture long-term spatio-temporal dependencies in data. In this manner, our hybrid architecture achieves an improved performance compared to using either models individually. Our experimental results show that our approach is effective for detecting the different stages of Parkinson’s disease from gait data, with a final accuracy of 88%, outperforming other state-of-the-art AI methods on the Physionet gait dataset. Moreover, our method can be generalized and adapted for other classification problems to jointly address the feature relevance and spatio-temporal dependency problems in 1D signals. Our source code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://​github.​com/​SafwenNaimi.