A coordinate attention enhanced swin transformer for handwriting recognition of Parkinson's disease

Abstract

Diagnosing Parkinson's disease (PD) in its early stages is a significant challenge in medicine. Hand tremors and dysgraphia, which are typical early motor symptoms of PD, can manifest for decades before a formal diagnosis is made. Therefore, handwriting analysis has become an important tool for detecting PD. While many machine learning algorithms have been applied in this area, they struggle to capture the subtle changes in handwriting and must describe features from various perspectives. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Coordinate Attention Enhanced Swin Transformer (CAS Transformer) model for PD handwriting recognition. It establishes the long‐term dependence of features on the joint coordinate attention application, which enables the model to more accurately localize the important features of handwriting data and also extract the fuzzy edge features of handwriting images.These characteristics of the CAS Transformer enable it to outperform current advanced deep learning methods in classification, with an accuracy of 92.68% in experiments conducted on two handwritten datasets.