Fractal dimensions and machine learning for detection of Parkinson’s disease in resting-state electroencephalography

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is an incurable neurological disorder that degenerates the cerebrospinal nervous system and hinders motor functions. Electroencephalography (EEG) signal analysis can provide reliable information regarding PD conditions. However, EEG is a complex, multichannel, and nonlinear signal with noise that problematizes identifying PD symptoms. A few studies have employed fractal dimension (FD) to extract distinguishing PD features from EEG signals. However, no exploratory study exists, as per our knowledge, on the efficiency of the different FD measures. We aim to conduct a comparative analysis of the various FDs that, as feature extraction measures, can discriminate PD patients who are ON and OFF medication from healthy controls using ML architecture. This study has implemented and analyzed several techniques for segmentation, feature extraction, and ML models. The results show that k-nearest neighbors (KNN) classifier with Higuchi FD and 90% overlap for segmented window delivers the highest accuracies, yielding a mean accuracy of \(99.65\pm 0.15\%\) $99.65\pm 0.15\%$ for PD patients ON medication and \(99.45\pm 0.18\%\) $99.45\pm 0.18\%$ for PD patients OFF medication, respectively. The model accurately identifies the signs of the disease in resting-state EEG with almost equivalent accuracy in both OFF and ON medication patients. To enhance the interpretability in our study, we leveraged XGB’s feature importance to generate brain topographic plots. This integration of explainable AI (XAI) enhanced the transparency and comprehensibility of our model’s classifications. Additionally, a comparison between the performance of FD and a few entropy measures has also been drawn to validate the significance of FD as a superior feature extraction measure. This study contributes to the body of knowledge with an architectural pipeline for detecting PD in resting-state EEG while emphasizing fractal dimension as an effective way of extracting salient features from EEG signals.