Multi-scale Frequency-Aware Adversarial Network for Parkinson's Disease Assessment Using Wearable Sensors

Abstract

Severity assessment of Parkinson's disease (PD) using wearable sensors offers an effective, objective basis for clinical management. However, general-purpose time series models often lack pathological specificity in feature extraction, making it difficult to capture subtle signals highly correlated with PD.Furthermore, the temporal sparsity of PD symptoms causes key diagnostic features to be easily "diluted" by traditional aggregation methods, further complicating assessment. To address these issues, we propose the Multi-scale Frequency-Aware Adversarial Multi-Instance Network (MFAM). This model enhances feature specificity through a frequency decomposition module guided by medical prior knowledge. Furthermore, by introducing an attention-based multi-instance learning (MIL) framework, the model can adaptively focus on the most diagnostically valuable sparse segments.We comprehensively validated MFAM on both the public PADS dataset for PD versus differential diagnosis (DD) binary classification and a private dataset for four-class severity assessment. Experimental results demonstrate that MFAM outperforms general-purpose time series models in handling complex clinical time series with specificity, providing a promising solution for automated assessment of PD severity.