Neurológiai betegségek (pl. Alzheimer-kór, Huntington-kór, Parkinson-kór)
Pszichiátria
Pszichiátriai betegségek
Pszicholingvisztika és neurolingvisztika: nyelvtanulás és nyelvtudás, beszédpatológia
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that develops for years before
clinical manifestation, while mild cognitive impairment is clinically considered as
a prodromal stage of AD. For both types of neurodegenerative disorders, early diagnosis
is crucial for the timely treatment and to decelerate progression. Unfortunately,
the current diagnostic solutions are time-consuming. Here, we seek to exploit the
observation that these illnesses frequently disturb the mental and linguistic functions,
which might be detected from the spontaneous speech produced by the patient. First,
we present an automatic speech recognition based procedure for the extraction of a
special set of acoustic features. Second, we present a linguistic feature set that
is extracted from the transcripts of the same speech signals. The usefulness of the
two feature sets is evaluated via machine learning experiments, where our goal is
not only to differentiate between the patients and the healthy control group, but
also to tell apart Alzheimer's patients from those with mild cognitive impairment.
Our results show that based on only the acoustic features, we are able to separate
the various groups with accuracy scores between 74-82%. We attained similar accuracy
scores when using only the linguistic features. With the combination of the two types
of features, the accuracy scores rise to between 80-86%, and the corresponding F-1
values also fall between 78-86%. We hope that with the full automation of the processing
chain, our method can serve as the basis of an automatic screening test in the future.
(C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
