Early Diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease Through Lite HGWA-Net Model: A Hybrid CNN Based on Wavelet Transform and Attention Mechanism

<b>Background/Objectives</b>: Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder in ageing populations, yet early diagnosis before motor symptoms remains critical. Reliable identification of subtle nigral alterations at early stages of the disease on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) remains challenging. This limitation is mainly attributed to the subjective and low sensitivity of manual image interpretation in early PD. Here, we demonstrate a deep learning-based framework to enhance early PD detection. The study's novelty is a lightweight deep learning framework that captures spatial, textural, and frequency-domain PD biomarkers without heavy network architectures or manual region delineation. <b>Methods:</b> The model integrates GhostNet with ensemble learning to combine local and global spatial information. This model employs wavelet-based frequency feature extraction rather than downsampling and incorporates an attention module to focus on relevant image regions, particularly changes in the substantia nigra (SN) region. Segmentation is employed solely as an auxiliary intermediate step to localize the SN and guide discriminative feature extraction. The final output is a binary classification that distinguishes PD patients from healthy controls. T2-weighted MRI data from the PPMI database are employed. <b>Results</b>: The proposed model achieved an F1-score of 0.8762, demonstrating robust performance under class imbalance, outperforming state-of-the-art models with only 2.03 million parameters and 4.36 Giga Floating Point Operations (GFLOPs). The architecture uncovered texture and frequency patterns previously inaccessible with conventional CNN pipelines. Model comparisons demonstrated consistent gains across all evaluated metrics (all <i>p</i> < 0.001), establishing robust diagnostic improvement. <b>Conclusions</b>: These findings establish an efficient, high-performing framework for reliable MRI-based PD identification. The approach provides automated early detection and supports clinically scalable, computationally lightweight screening tools.