Employing Siamese Networks as Quantitative Biomarker for Assessing the Effect of Dolphin-Assisted Therapy on Pediatric Cerebral Palsy

Abstract

This study explores the potential of using a Siamese Network as a biomarker for assessing the effectiveness of Dolphin-Assisted Therapy (DAT) in children with Spastic Cerebral Palsy (SCP). The problem statement revolves around the need for objective measures to evaluate the impact of DAT on patients with SCP, considering the subjective nature of traditional assessment methods. The methodology involves training a Siamese network, a type of neural network designed to compare similarities between inputs, using data collected from SCP patients undergoing DAT sessions. The study employed Event-Related Potential (ERP) and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) analyses to examine cerebral activity and brain rhythms, proposing the use of SNN to compare electroencephalographic (EEG) signals of children with cerebral palsy before and after Dolphin-Assisted Therapy. Testing on samples from four children yielded a high average similarity index of 0.9150, indicating consistent similarity metrics before and after therapy. The network is trained to learn patterns and similarities between pre- and post-therapy evaluations, in order to identify biomarkers indicative of therapy effectiveness. Notably, the Siamese Network’s architecture ensures that comparisons are made within the same feature space, allowing for more accurate assessments. The results of the study demonstrate promising findings, indicating different patterns in the output of the Siamese Network that correlate with improvements in symptoms of SCP post-DAT. Confirming these observations will require large, longitudinal studies but such findings would suggest that the Siamese Network could have utility as a biomarker in monitoring treatment responses for children with SCP who undergo DAT and offer them more objective as well as quantifiable manners of assessing therapeutic interventions. Great discrepancies in neuronal voltage perturbations, 7.9825 dB on average at the specific samples compared to the whole dataset (6.2838 dB), imply a noted deviation from resting activity. These findings indicate that Dolphin-Assisted Therapy activates particular brain regions specifically during the intervention.