Neural feature extraction for the analysis of Parkinsonian patient handwriting

Parkinson’s is a disease of the central nervous system characterized by neuronal necrosis. Patients at the time of diagnosis have already lost up to 70% of the neurons. It is essential to define early detection techniques to promptly intervene with appropriate therapy. Handwriting analysis has been proven as a reliable method for Parkinson’s diagnose and monitoring. This pa-per presents an analysis of a Parkinson’s handwriting dataset in which neural networks are used as a tool for analyzing the problem space. The goal is to check the validity of the selected features. For estimating the data intrinsic di-mensionality, a preliminary analysis based on PCA is performed. Then, a com-parative analysis about the classification performances of a multilayer percep-tron (MLP) has been conducted in order to determine the discriminative capa-bilities of the input features. Finally, fifteen temporal features, capable of a more meaningful discrimination, have been extracted and the classification per-formances of the MLP trained on these new datasets have been compared with the previous ones for selecting the best features.