| Popis: |
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive movement disorder characterized by tremors at rest, bradykinesia, and stifness. The alteration of handwriting (HW) faculties is one of the earliest motor symptoms in PD patients. This characteristic can be exploited to develop an automatic aid system for early detection of this pathologie. This article aims to assess the importance of diacritics and punctuation marks (DPM) in the PD patients and healthy controls (HCs) discrimination problem, by comparing the classification results obtained from three components: text carrying DPM, text without DPM, as well as only DPM. This work includes the Arabic manuscripts of 31 PD patients and 31 HCs. Furthermore, kinematic, mechanic, and inclination features were calculated for each component. Then, Adaboost models have been constructed on different feature sets, as well as on reduced sets formed in incremental manner using mRMR ranked-feature selection method. From the obtained results, it was concluded that the separating power of HW features in the classification problem of PD patients and HCs is present in all components of the Arabic text, but in varying degrees of importance. Despite the simple graphical nature of DPM, they are carrying of relevant diagnostic information, and effectively contributing to the improvement of PD detection performance. The highest accuracy of 93.54% was achieved for this component. |
