An innovative approach for parkinson’s disease diagnosis using CNN, NCA, and SVM

Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a prevalent neurodegenerative disorder affecting millions of people globally, with substantial health risks and economic burdens. This study aims to introduce an innovative hybrid approach combining deep learning and machine learning algorithms to improve the diagnosis of PD using handwriting dynamics indicative of Parkinson’s symptoms. The proposed approach integrates hybrid feature extraction using nine fine-tuned transfer learning models, i.e., InceptionV3, DenseNet201, EfficientNetB0, ResNet50, MobileNetV2, VGG16, Xception, NASNetMobile, and InceptionResNetV2. Initially, features from these models are used individually or in binary and ternary combinations. Given the limited sample size in PD datasets, some extracted features through fine-tuning may lack significance, and fully connected layers can lead to overfitting. To address this issue, Neighborhood Component Analysis (NCA) is employed to refine these features, retaining only the most informative ones. Finally, the selected features are classified using Support Vector Machines (SVM) maximizing the margin between classes and reducing the risk of overfitting. The proposed hybrid model achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy of 99.39% on the Parkinson Hand Drawings dataset. The combination of features extracted from DenseNet201, Xception, and NASNetMobile models, processed using NCA and SVM methods, has been identified as the most efficient model, balancing high accuracy with computational efficiency. Qualitative assessments further confirm the accuracy and reliability of the approach. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2024.