Neurodegenerative diseases, like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Huntington’s disease (HD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD) are common progressive nervous system disorders that show intricate clinical patterns. 

Using gait fluctuations for disease state evaluation is an essential way for clinical trials and healthcare monitoring for neurodegenerative patients.  

The research team led by Prof. FAN Jianping and Prof. WANG Lei from the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposed a topological analysis framework to characterize the dynamics of the gait fluctuations in different neurodegenerative diseases, which provided a robust qualitative descriptor for the neurodegenerative disease. The study was published in IEEE Access. 

In this study, the proposed topological motion analysis framework was designed for the gait fluctuation time series analysis. The gait fluctuation time series were embedded into phase spaces by using the nonlinear dynamics analysis technique, with which the corresponding point clouds were achieved. The point clouds were used to perform persistence homology building, i.e., topological signature extraction. The topological signatures of barcodes, persistence diagrams, and persistence landscapes were extracted to classify different gait fluctuation types.  

Furthermore, through a comprehensive comparison study on multiple gait fluctuations, including stride-interval, stance-interval and swing-interval-based, the proposed method was performed on the dataset of the healthy control group and abnormal ones with ALS, HD and PD groups respectively, the results showed promising ability in state recognition and neurodegenerative disease classification.  

The study demonstrated for the first time that the topological descriptors in different gait fluctuation time series, which provided a novel insight for human gait modeling and gave evidence for the potential clinical use in biomedical signal analysis. 

This work is funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Media Contact: 
ZHANG Xiaomin 
Email: xm.zhang@siat.ac.cn