AccScience Publishing / AIH / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/AIH026060012
ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE

Decoding Parkinsonian tremor: An explainable framework integrating spatial and spectral dynamics of multi-revolution spiral drawings

Tharaka Wijethunge1 Maheshi Dissanayake2* Sajitha Weerasinghe3
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1 Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, United States of America
2 Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Peradeniya, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
3 Neurology Unit, Teaching Hospital Peradeniya, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
Received: 6 February 2026 | Revised: 20 March 2026 | Accepted: 24 March 2026 | Published online: 8 May 2026
© 2026 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

Parkinson’s disease manifests with motor impairments that are detectable through digitized spiral drawings. This study introduces an explainable framework for Parkinson’s disease screening using a novel radial-sampling feature fusion approach. We transform two-dimensional spiral images into one-dimensional revolution signals via a systematic ray-sampling technique to extract three distinct revolutions. We integrate spatial metrics, such as inter-revolution spacing variability and root mean square radial derivatives, with spectral descriptors derived from fast Fourier transform analysis across low-, mid-, and high-harmonic bands. A total of 20 features were utilized to train state-of-the-art machine learning models, including support vector machines, random forests, and light gradient boosting machines. Among these, the random-forest classifier demonstrated superior performance. Subsequent five-fold cross-validation stability analysis, along with feature importance analysis, identified the root mean square radial derivative of the outer revolution (r3_derive_rms) as the most critical biomarker. Stratified cross-validation demonstrates that combining spatial and frequency features significantly enhances detection accuracy compared to single-domain methods, facilitating effective clinical deployment even in data-scarce environments. This interpretable pipeline provides a robust, low-cost “white-box” screening tool, offering a practical alternative to opaque deep-learning models for early clinical intervention.

Graphical abstract
Keywords
Parkinson’s disease
Explainable artificial intelligence
Feature fusion
Spectral analysis
Spiral drawings
Biomarker identification
Funding
None.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare they have no competing interests.
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