Sarcopenia diagnosis using skeleton-based gait sequence and foot-pressure image datasets

Introduction: Sarcopenia is a common age-related disease, defined as a decrease in muscle strength and function owing to reduced skeletal muscle. One way to diagnose sarcopenia is through gait analysis and foot-pressure imaging.

Motivation and research gap: We collected our own multimodal dataset from 100 subjects, consisting of both foot-pressure and skeleton data with real patients, which provides a unique resource for future studies aimed at more comprehensive analyses. While artificial intelligence has been employed for sarcopenia detection, previous studies have predominantly focused on skeleton-based datasets without exploring the combined potential of skeleton and foot pressure dataset. This study conducts separate experiments for foot-pressure and skeleton datasets, it demonstrates the potential of each data type in sarcopenia classification.

Methods: This study had two components. First, we collected skeleton and foot-pressure datasets and classified them into sarcopenia and non-sarcopenia groups based on grip strength, gait performance, and appendicular skeletal muscle mass. Second, we performed experiments on the foot-pressure dataset using the ResNet-18 and spatiotemporal graph convolutional network (ST-GCN) models on the skeleton dataset to classify normal and abnormal gaits due to sarcopenia. For an accurate diagnosis, real-time walking of 100 participants was recorded at 30 fps as RGB + D images. The skeleton dataset was constructed by extracting 3D skeleton information comprising 25 feature points from the image, whereas the foot-pressure dataset was constructed by exerting pressure on the foot-pressure plates.

Results: As a baseline evaluation, the accuracies of sarcopenia classification performance from foot-pressure image using Resnet-18 and skeleton sequences using ST-GCN were identified as 77.16 and 78.63%, respectively.

Discussion: The experimental results demonstrated the potential applications of sarcopenia and non-sarcopenia classifications based on foot-pressure images and skeleton sequences.