This paper proposes a novel diagnosis support method based on peripheral autonomic nervous activity for patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). The method measures rates of change in fingertip plethysmograms and arterial stiffness in transition between a supine position and a standing position of a subject, and calculates fingertip plethysmogram and arterial stiffness changes associated with angular variation from the pre-standing supine position to the standing position during a head-up tilt test. Based on the measured indices, the classification probability of PD presence is finally obtained as a biomarker using a log-linearized Gaussian mixture network. 25 patients with PD symptoms (15 with autonomic defects and 10 without) took part in the experiment. The results showed non-significant differences between the patient groups with autonomic defects and without autonomic defects in comparison of each single index on fingertip plethysmogram and arterial stiffness, but a significant difference (p<0.001) between the two groups was observed in the output index of the proposed system. Moreover, receiver operation characteristics (ROC) analysis showed that the area under the curve (AUC) of the proposed biomarker was 0.83 and the classification rate of PD presence was 100% for the learning data and 80% for the unlearned test data.

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The luciferin/luciferase/Adenosine Tri-Phosphate (ATP) bioluminescent method is commonly used for cleanliness verification of food processing field. Recent years measurement method using ATP is utilized in medical field for its simplicity, rapidity and highly sensitivity. However, for the assessment of the ATP measurement method has not yet showed that correlation between the protein and ATP in fresh human blood. This study examined the correlation between the amount of protein and ATP of fresh human blood. We collected blood samples from healthy 10 adults. We measured the ATP and ATP+AMP (Adenosine Mono-Phosphate) values of diluted blood solutions by using each measuring instruments. Furthermore, the amount of protein in each solution was measured by the Bradford protein assay. Both amount of ATP and ATP + AMP had greater variation and depended on the dilution obtained and mostly showed decline over time. For the amount of protein and ATP and ATP + AMP value of the log in the dilution showed strong positive correlation. The results of this study suggest the effective use of the ATP measurement method in healthcare settings.

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