Multimodal classification of Parkinson’s disease in home environments with resiliency to missing modalities

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a chronic neurodegenerative condition that affects a patient’s everyday life. Authors have proposed that a machine learning and sensor-based approach that contin-uously monitors patients in naturalistic settings can provide constant evaluation of PD and objectively analyse its progression. In this paper, we make progress toward such PD evaluation by presenting a multimodal deep learning approach for discriminating between people with PD and without PD. Specifically, our proposed architecture, named MCPD-Net, uses two data modalities, acquired from vision and accelerometer sensors in a home environment to train variational autoencoder (VAE) models. These are modality-specific VAEs that predict effective representations of human movements to be fused and given to a classification module. During our end-to-end training, we minimise the difference between the latent spaces corresponding to the two data modalities. This makes our method capable of dealing with missing modalities during inference. We show that our proposed multimodal method outperforms unimodal and other multimodal approaches by an average increase in F₁-score of 0.25 and 0.09, respectively, on a data set with real patients. We also show that our method still outperforms other approaches by an average increase in F₁-score of 0.17 when a modality is missing during inference, demonstrating the benefit of training on multiple modalities.