Postoperative Recovery Assessment for Parkinson's Patients via Light-Weighted Topological Pose Estimation

The UPDRS III scale plays a critical role in diagnosing the progression of Parkinson's disease. Current methods often involve doctors guiding patients through specific actions on the scale, recording their performance, and assigning scores. However, this approach has several drawbacks, including the lengthy time required for doctor-patient communication, the high costs of patients traveling to hospitals for follow-up visits, and the reliance on subjective judgments from doctors, which lack standardized criteria. With advancements in artificial intelligence, many traditional processes have been partially automated. To help patients reduce diagnosis time, lower medical costs, and provide more accurate and objective evaluation results, this paper proposes a Transformer-based pose estimation model for assessing UPDRS III scale actions. By integrating skeleton-based evaluations from the network with a series of post-processing operations, the model enables patients to perform self-assessments of their post-treatment recovery at home, saving doctors significant time. This work introduces a cascaded graph self-attention module, SGAM (Spatial-Graphical Attention Module), to enhance the network's understanding of human topology. Additionally, it proposes a lightweight convolutional block, Chi-block, which employs a novel approach leveraging the attribute invariance of filters to interpret model performance and guide compression. This approach reduces computational costs and model parameters while preserving accuracy. The proposed method demonstrates robust performance on human pose estimation (HPE) datasets and showcases impressive lightweight performance on benchmark datasets such as ImageNet-1 K and CIFAR-10. These results demonstrate the potential of artificial intelligence in enabling automated remote diagnosis and treatment for Parkinson's patients.