Auto Diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease Via a Deep Learning Model Based on Mixed Emotional Facial Expressions

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common degenerative disease of the nervous system in the elderly. The early diagnosis of PD is very important for potential patients to receive prompt treatment and avoid the aggravation of the disease. Recent studies have found that PD patients always suffer from emotional expression disorder, thus forming the characteristics of “masked faces”. Based on this, we thus propose an auto PD diagnosis method based on mixed emotional facial expressions in the paper. Specifically, the proposed method is cast into four steps: Firstly, we synthesize virtual face images containing six basic expressions (i.e., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) via generative adversarial learning, in order to approximate the premorbid expressions of PD patients; Secondly, we design an effective screening scheme to assess the quality of the above synthesized facial expression images and then shortlist the high-quality ones; Thirdly, we train a deep feature extractor accompanied with a facial expression classifier based on the mixture of the original facial expression images of the PD patients, the high-quality synthesized facial expression images of PD patients, and the normal facial expression images from other public face datasets; Finally, with the well-trained deep feature extractor, we thus adopt it to extract the latent expression features for six facial expression images of a potential PD patient to conduct PD/non-PD prediction. To show real-world impacts, we also collected a new facial expression dataset of PD patients in collaboration with a hospital. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method for PD diagnosis and facial expression recognition.