Denoised MDS-UPDRS Part-III Scores Yield New Patterns of Progression Heterogeneity in Early Stage Parkinson's Disease (opens in new tab)

Parkinson's Disease (PD) Motor Scores (MDS-UPDRS Part III) are quite noisy. This paper proposes a new methodology for processing these scores by first denoising the scores to enhance the underlying progression signal, and then conducting a high-dimensional analysis which does not sum the scores into a total movement score. The analysis gives novel insights into PD progression heterogeneity: it reveals that the heterogeneity is continuously variable rather than clustered into "subtypes" and th...