Multimodal Electrophysiological Signals for Machine Learning-Aided Parkinson’s Disease Diagnosis

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder affecting motor and autonomic nervous system functions. In this study, six synchronized modalities—electroencephalography (EEG), electrocardiography (ECG), electromyography (EMG), respiration (Resp), photoplethysmography (PPG), and gait (Gait)—were recorded from 25 PD patients and 25 healthy controls. A Random Forest classifier was used to perform both unimodal and multimodal signal classification. Among unimodal models, ECG achieved the highest accuracy (84%), whereas the performance of multimodal combinations did not increase linearly with the number of modalities; integrating three or more complementary signals was sufficient to substantially improve classification. The full six-modality model achieved an accuracy of 95.00%, precision of 94.17%, recall of 97.14%, F1 score of 95.21%, and an AUC of 0.98. Incremental analysis further indicated that selecting key complementary modalities can maintain high classification performance while reducing equipment requirements, simplifying experimental procedures, and improving participant comfort, providing guidance for the development of efficient, non-invasive PD diagnostic tools.