Identification of Abnormal Movements in Infants: A Deep Neural Network for Body Part-Based Prediction of Cerebral Palsy

The early diagnosis of cerebral palsy is an area which has recently seen significant multi-disciplinary research. Diagnostic tools such as the General Movements Assessment (GMA), have produced some very promising results, however these manual methods can be laborious. The prospect of automating these processes is seen as key in advancing this field of study. In our previous works, we examined the viability of using pose-based features extracted from RGB video sequences to undertake classification of infant body movements based upon the GMA. In this paper, we propose a new deep learning framework for this classification task. We also propose a visualization framework which identifies body-parts with the greatest contribution towards a classification decision. The inclusion of a visualization framework is an important step towards automation as it helps make the decisions made by the machine learning framework interpretable. We directly compare the proposed framework's classification with several other methods from the literature using two independent datasets. Our experimental results show that the proposed method performs more consistently and more robustly than our previous pose-based techniques as well as other features from related works in this setting. We also find that our visualization framework helps provide greater interpretability, enhancing the likelihood of the adoption of these technologies within the medical domain.

Automated summary

This paper explores new methods for automated early diagnosis of cerebral palsy, including using a deep learning framework and visualization techniques for infant body movement classification. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms previous pose-based techniques and other features from related works in terms of consistency and robustness, while the visualization framework enhances interpretability and adoption in the medical domain.