PULSAR: Graph based <u>P</u> ositive <u>U</u> nlabeled <u>L</u> earning with Multi <u>S</u> tream <u>A</u> daptive Convolutions for Parkinson’s Disease <u>R</u> ecognition

Timely diagnosis of movement disorders like Parkinson's disease (PD) improves quality of life. However, access to clinical diagnosis is limited in low-income countries. Here, we present PULSAR, a novel method for classifying individuals with or without PD from webcam-recorded videos of the finger-tapping task used in the Movement Disorder Society - Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS). PULSAR was trained and evaluated on data from 382 participants, including 183 self-reported PD patients. We used an adaptive graph convolutional neural network to dynamically learn task-specific spatio-temporal edges and enhanced it with a multi-stream convolution model to capture critical features like finger joint locations, tapping velocity, and acceleration of tapping. As video labels are self-reported, some non-PD labels may be undiagnosed cases. To address this, we used Positive Unlabeled (PU) Learning, which outperformed traditional supervised learning. PULSAR achieved 80.95% accuracy on the validation set and 71.29% mean accuracy (2.49% standard deviation) on an independent test set. We hope PULSAR can aid in accessible PD screening and that these techniques may extend to assessing disorders like ataxia and Huntington's disease.

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Publication Details

Journal
ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare
Published
2026-02-26
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3799417
Primary Topic
Parkinson's Disease Mechanisms and Treatments
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

PULSAR: Graph based <u>P</u> ositive <u>U</u> nlabeled <u>L</u> earning with Multi <u>S</u> tream <u>A</u> daptive Convolutions for Parkinson’s Disease <u>R</u> ecognition

Md. Zarif Ul Alam, Asif Azad, Md Ehsan Hoque, Md Saiful Islam et al.
ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare
Parkinson's Disease Mechanisms and Treatments
article

PULSAR: Graph based <u>P</u> ositive <u>U</u> nlabeled <u>L</u> earning with Multi <u>S</u> tream <u>A</u> daptive Convolutions for Parkinson’s Disease <u>R</u> ecognition

Md. Zarif Ul Alam, Asif Azad, Md Ehsan Hoque, Md Saiful Islam, M Saifur Rahman
article en

Abstract

Timely diagnosis of movement disorders like Parkinson's disease (PD) improves quality of life. However, access to clinical diagnosis is limited in low-income countries. Here, we present PULSAR, a novel method for classifying individuals with or without PD from webcam-recorded videos of the finger-tapping task used in the Movement Disorder Society - Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS). PULSAR was trained and evaluated on data from 382 participants, including 183 self-reported PD patients. We used an adaptive graph convolutional neural network to dynamically learn task-specific spatio-temporal edges and enhanced it with a multi-stream convolution model to capture critical features like finger joint locations, tapping velocity, and acceleration of tapping. As video labels are self-reported, some non-PD labels may be undiagnosed cases. To address this, we used Positive Unlabeled (PU) Learning, which outperformed traditional supervised learning. PULSAR achieved 80.95% accuracy on the validation set and 71.29% mean accuracy (2.49% standard deviation) on an independent test set. We hope PULSAR can aid in accessible PD screening and that these techniques may extend to assessing disorders like ataxia and Huntington's disease.

ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BD), University of Massachusetts Amherst (US), Bangladesh University of Business and Technology (BD), University of Rochester (US)
No poverty
Openalex Percentile: Top 47%
Parkinson's Disease Mechanisms and Treatments
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