Submovement Characteristics are Related to the Presence of Parkinson's Disease

There is a need to understand whether pathological changes affect underlying mechanisms of motor control in Parkinson's disease. Because submovements identified using a recently introduced movement decomposition technique may be related to fundamental aspects of motor control, we used a data-driven approach to explore their morphological and kinematic characteristics during rapid alternating movements performed by 10 subjects with PD and 12 healthy controls. A feature selection technique and supervised classification models were used to identify features of these submovements that were relevant to the presence of PD. Two novel, informative features were identified that may relate to impairments in exploration and control mechanisms. Morphological differences in submovements identified by our analyses may be of use to future work that aims to better understand the pathophysiology of PD.Clinical relevance- The identified morphological differences in submovements may provide insights into the underlying motor control impairments in PD, potentially aiding in diagnosis and therapeutic interventions.