Optimizing and simplifying the MDS-UPDRS scale for Parkinson's Disease progression

Prof.Ron Shamir (PhD, UC Berkeley 1984) is a professor emeritus of Computer Science and Bioinformatics at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He develops algorithms and software to understand the genome and human disease. His group’s computational tools have been downloaded tens of thousands of times and are used in hundreds of laboratories worldwide. He is a Fellow of the ISCB and the ACM, a recipient of the Landau and Kadar prizes, the Senior Scientist Award of the ISCB and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the ISBCB.

Abstract:

The standard tool for evaluating Parkinson’s Disease severity is the MDS-UPDRS scale, a 65-item questionnaire completed by the caregiver and the patient. In a retrospective observational analysis of a large longitudinal cohort, we developed methods that identified which items most strongly indicate PD progression, down-weighting or excluding many less informative items. Compared to the current scale, these methods substantially improve concordance with disease progression, using far fewer and even only self-reported items. Joint work with Assaf Benesh (TAU), Roy Alcalay and Anat Mirelman (Ichilov)