Objective: Our aim was to assess the utility of a novel electronic pen system in the differential diagnosis of PD at the time of referral.

Background: Diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease (PD) is primarily done based on clinical criteria, with imaging (e.g. DaTSCAN) used where the diagnosis is in doubt. However, scanning can be very expensive, is an unpleasant experience for many patients and scanning facilities are not always available in many parts of the world.

Methods: Data were collected from patients referred to 5 hospitals across the north of England with a suspected diagnosis of PD. Patients completed a series of drawing and writing tasks using an electronic pen to draw/write on a digitized tablet. Classification by the system was compared to gold standard diagnosis of either expert clinical opinion or DaTSCAN. The findings were compared to earlier work on patients at University Medical Centre, Groningen, The Netherlands and Dublin Neurological Institute, Ireland.

Results: In preliminary analysis, data were available for 30 patients across northern England and 92 patients from the centers in Groningen and Dublin. Sensitivity for PD was 69.0% and specificity was 83.3%. The device was able to successfully distinguish people with PD from people without PD and those with other movement disorders, such as essential tremor.

Conclusions: Preliminary findings are encouraging and external validation of the system will now be conducted. Such systems have the potential to reduce waiting time to reduce the need for DaTSCAN to confirm diagnosis of PD. This would reduce costs to health service providers and reduce patient waiting times to diagnosis from referral.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/can-a-novel-digital-pen-system-assist-clinicians-in-the-differential-diagnosis-of-parkinsons-disease/