The Effectiveness and Cost Effectiveness of Intelligent Assessment of Gait Disorder in Silent Cerebrovascular Disease

This is a multi-center, randomized, double-blind, parallel-controlled, prospective study to compare the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of intelligent and doctor groups for gait disorder screening.

Clinical data, including demographic characteristics, socioeconomic level, medical history, assessment of neurological function, laboratory tests, imaging tests, health service utilization, and costs will be collected from the subjects. All subjects will be divided into an intelligent group and a doctor group according to a 1:1 ratio. The intelligent group will undergo intelligent system evaluation, and the doctor group will undergo the clinician's conventional treatment process. At the same time, all the subjects will undergo gold-standard panel gait and cognitive rating scale assessments.

All subjects in the intelligent group will undergo tests to evaluate their nervous system function, including the timed up-and-go test, mini-cognitive assessment, and sentence repetition. Subjects will be recorded using a camera and microphone. The intelligent system uses the built-in intelligent algorithm to analyze the gait video, sound, and picture to provide information on gait features (stand-up time, turnaround time, stride length, step velocity, stride length, step width, etc.), language features (pronunciation, intonation, word order, language accuracy, language fluency, etc.), and clock features (contour, numbers, pointers, etc.).

All subjects in the doctor group will consult with a doctor in the non-intelligent group according to the routine treatment procedure. Doctors in the non-intelligent group are required to be internal medicine clinicians with intermediate title or below, and they should have registered their qualifications, relevant knowledge and training experience, educational background, and other information in the early stage of the study. The doctors in the non-intelligent group will make clinical diagnoses for the subjects based on routine medical operations such as a history of the present illness, previous history, and physical examination, and the data in medical records in the outpatient department will help determine whether the subjects have gait disorders.

All subjects' walking videos will be assessed by the gold-standard panel, which will consist of 2 experts of movement disorders. If there is any difference, a third expert will be included in the evaluation. According to the clinical experience, the expert doctors will evaluate the subjects' gait, and the results will be divided into normal gait and abnormal gait.

Eligibility Criteria:
Inclusion Criteria:

1. Aged between 60 and 85 years.
2. Diagnosed with silent cerebrovascular disease/silent stroke, which is consistent with the 2016 statement issued by the American Heart Association (AHA) and American Stroke Association (ASA):

   1. No previous clear history of stroke and no clinical symptoms or mild clinical symptoms that fail to attract clinical attention;
   2. Cranial MRI showing at least one of the following within 5 years: lacunar infarct of vascular origin, white matter hyperintensity of vascular origin, cerebral microbleeds;
3. Consciousness and ability to complete cognitive assessment
4. Ability to stand and walk independently and complete gait assessment without assistance from others.
5. Ability to sign the informed consent.

Exclusion Criteria:

1. Intracranial lesions that have been clearly diagnosed as demyelination disease, white matter dystrophy, intracranial space-occupying lesions, or autoimmune encephalitis.
2. Gait disorder that has been diagnosed as Parkinson's disease, normal cranial hydrocephalus, an otogenic disease, subacute combined degeneration, peripheral neuropathy, osteoarthritis, or lumbar disease.
3. Cognitive disorders that have been diagnosed, such as Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal dementia, Lewy body dementia, etc.
4. Severe neurological diseases such as previous cerebral trauma, epilepsy, and myelopathy, etc.
5. Severe cardiovascular complications and intolerance to the assessment
6. Severe visual or hearing impairment, aphasia, cognitive disorder, gait disorder, etc., that results in the inability to cooperate for cognitive and gait assessment
7. Refusal to participate in the study
8. Other anomalies that could not be included in the exclusion criteria, but are considered inappropriate to be included in this study.