Detecting Brain Cancer Progression Through Signatures of Wearable Accelerometry Data
Abstract: Glioblastoma and other high-grade gliomas (HGG) have a poor prognosis and are associated with progressive functional decline. The standard of care to assess progressive disease is contrast-enhanced MRI, which is expensive, claustrophobic, and performed only once every 2-3 months. Wearable accelerometers offer a non-invasive alternative for continuously monitoring patient function between clinic visits. However, accelerometry data streams are typically noisy and highly patient-specific, making conventional time series methods and summary statistics poorly suited to detecting clinically meaningful change. This work aims to classify stable versus progressive disease states by applying rough path signatures for feature extraction from wrist-worn accelerometer data. We convert accelerometer recordings from HGG patients enrolled in the BrainWear study into walking-path segments and use signature kernel maximum mean discrepancy (SigMMD) to quantify change in patients' walking behaviour. We overcome the challenge of inter-patient heterogeneity by adjusting for the natural variation in a patient's walking during stable tumour periods. This patient-specific normalisation substantially improves separation, yielding a candidate biomarker of tumour progression. Our results provide proof-of-concept evidence that signature-based analysis of wearable accelerometry can distinguish stable from progressive disease states, motivating larger longitudinal studies of continuous wearable monitoring as a digital biomarker in neuro-oncology.