  Background: Huntington's disease (HD) is a rare, genetically determined brain
disorder that limits the life of the patient, although early prognosis of HD
can substantially improve the patient's quality of life. Current HD prognosis
methods include using a variety of complex biomarkers such as clinical and
imaging factors, however these methods have many shortfalls, such as their
resource demand and failure to distinguish symptomatic and asymptomatic
patients. Quantitative biomedical signaling has been used for diagnosis of
other neurological disorders such as schizophrenia and has potential for
exposing abnormalities in HD patients. Methodology: In this project, we used a
premade, certified dataset collected at a clinic with 27 HD positive patients,
36 controls, and 6 unknowns with electroencephalography, electrocardiography,
and functional near-infrared spectroscopy data. We first preprocessed the data
and extracted a variety of features from both the transformed and raw signals,
after which we applied a plethora of shallow machine learning techniques.
Results: We found the highest accuracy was achieved by a scaled-out Extremely
Randomized Trees algorithm, with area under the curve of the receiver operator
characteristic of 0.963 and accuracy of 91.353%. The subsequent feature
analysis showed that 60.865% of the features had p<0.05, with the features from
the raw signal being most significant. Conclusion: The results indicate the
promise of neural and cardiac signals for marking abnormalities in HD, as well
as evaluating the progression of the disease in patients.
