Recognition analysis of spiral and straight-line drawings in tremor assessment

No standard, objective diagnostic procedure exists for most neurological diseases causing tremors. Therefore, drawing tests have been widely analyzed to support diagnostic procedures. In this study, we examine the comparison of Archimedean spiral and line drawings, the possibilities of their joint application, and the relevance of displaying pressure on the drawings to recognize Parkinsonism and cerebellar dysfunction. We further attempted to use an automatic processing and evaluation system.

Digital images were developed from raw data by adding or omitting pressure data. Pre-trained (MobileNet, Xception, ResNet50) models and a Baseline (from scratch) model were applied for binary classification with a fold cross-validation procedure. Predictions were analyzed separately by drawing tasks and in combination.

The neurological diseases presented here can be recognized with a significantly higher macro f1 score from the spiral drawing task (up to 95.7 %) than lines (up to 84.3 %). A significant improvement can be achieved if the spiral is supplemented with line drawing. The pressure inclusion in the images did not result in significant information gain.

The spiral drawing has a robust recognition power and can be supplemented with a line drawing task to increase the correct recognition. Moreover, X and Y coordinates appeared sufficient without pressure with this methodology.