Abstract
The work presented here is part of a larger study to identify novel technologies and biomarkers for early Alzheimer disease (AD) detection and it focuses on evaluating the suitability of a new approach for early AD diagnosis by non-invasive methods. The purpose is to examine in a pilot study the potential of applying intelligent algorithms to speech features obtained from suspected patients in order to contribute to the improvement of diagnosis of AD and its degree of severity. In this sense, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have been used for the automatic classification of the two classes (AD and control subjects). Two human issues have been analyzed for feature selection: Spontaneous Speech and Emotional Response. Not only linear features but also non-linear ones, such as Fractal Dimension, have been explored. The approach is non invasive, low cost and without any side effects. Obtained experimental results were very satisfactory and promising for early diagnosis and classification of AD patients.
Highlights
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia among elderly people in Western countries and it has a large socioeconomic cost to society which is expected to increase in the near future
We have focused our work on non-invasive diagnostic techniques based on the analysis of speech and emotions because after the loss of memory, one of the major problems of AD is the loss of language skills, illustrated by the poorer signal and spectrogram during spontaneous speech of the AD
Automatic classification by Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) was performed over the speech features sets described in Section 3.1.5 in order to analyze for the pilot study the tests: Automatic Spontaneous Speech fluency, Emotional Response in speech and both in Integral Speech
Summary
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia among elderly people in Western countries and it has a large socioeconomic cost to society which is expected to increase in the near future It is characterized by progressive and irreversible cognitive deterioration with memory loss, impaired judgment and language and other cognitive deficits and behavioural symptoms that end up becoming severe enough to limit the ability of an individual to perform professional, social or family activities of daily life. Associated behavioural and psychological symptoms include apathy, irritability, depression, anxiety, delusions, hallucinations, disinhibition, aggression, aberrant motor behaviour, as well as eating or sleep behaviour changes [1,2,3,4,5] All these symptoms lead to impaired performance in family, social or professional activities of daily life as the disease progresses from mild to moderate and to severe
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