Dysarthria Level Research Articles

Early detection of Parkinson's disease from multiple signal speech: Based on Mandarin language dataset.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that negatively affects millions of people. Early detection is of vital importance. As recent researches showed dysarthria level provides good indicators to the computer-assisted diagnosis and remote monitoring of patients at the early stages. It is the goal of this study to develop an automatic detection method based on newest collected Chinese dataset. Unlike English, no agreement was reached on the main features indicating language disorders due to vocal organ dysfunction. Thus, one of our approaches is to classify the speech phonation and articulation with a machine learning-based feature selection model. Based on a relatively big sample, three feature selection algorithms (LASSO, mRMR, Relief-F) were tested to select the vocal features extracted from speech signals collected in a controlled setting, followed by four classifiers (Naïve Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbor, Logistic Regression and Stochastic Gradient Descent) to detect the disorder. The proposed approach shows an accuracy of 75.76%, sensitivity of 82.44%, specificity of 73.15% and precision of 76.57%, indicating the feasibility and promising future for an automatic and unobtrusive detection on Chinese PD. The comparison among the three selection algorithms reveals that LASSO selector has the best performance regardless types of vocal features. The best detection accuracy is obtained by SGD classifier, while the best resulting sensitivity is obtained by LR classifier. More interestingly, articulation features are more representative and indicative than phonation features among all the selection and classifying algorithms. The most prominent articulation features are F1, F2, DDF1, DDF2, BBE and MFCC.

Parameterization of voice onset for automatic assessment of Parkinson’s disease

Acoustic analysis of Parkinson’s disease (PD) usually focuses on sustained oscillations of the vocal folds; however, the voice onset (transition from the rest state to a saturation value) is often neglected. In this study, we investigated the parameterization of the voice onset for the objective evaluation of PD. 50 PD patients (25 females) and 50 healthy controls (25 females) performed the sustained phonation of the vowels /ah/, /ih/, and /uh/. Three experts listened to the recordings and assessed the dysarthria level according to a modified version of the Frenchay dysarthria assessment scale (mFDA). We extracted the voice onset automatically, considering the time needed for the amplitude envelope of the acoustic signal to go from 10% up to 90% of the maximum value. Then, we computed filter bank features from the voice onset and pitch, loudness, and perturbation features from the sustained phonation. We performed automatic classification and regression analyses using support vector machines. We obtained a classification accuracy of 89% (AUC: 0.93) when we used feature importance analysis to reduce the feature set. In addition, the regression analysis showed a significant correlation (r: 0.583, p-value < 0.001) between the acoustic features and the mFDA scale. These results show the suitability of the voice onset for objective clinical evaluation of PD.

An investigation about the relationship between dysarthria level of speech and the neurological state of Parkinson’s patients

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the most common neurological disorder that typically affects elderly people. In the earlier stage of disease, it has been seen that 90% of the patients develop voice disorders namely hypokinetic dysarthria. As time passes, the severity of PD increases, and patients have difficulty performing different speech tasks. During the progression of the disease, due to less control of articulatory organs such as the tongue, jaw, and lips, the quality of speech signals deteriorates. Periodic medical evaluations are very important for PD patients; however, having access to a medical appointment with a neurologist is a privilege in most countries. Considering that the speech recording process is inexpensive and very easy to do, we want to explore in this paper the suitability of mapping information of the dysarthria level into the neurological state of patients and vice versa. Three levels of severity are considered in a multiclass framework using time–frequency (TF) features and random-forest along with an Error-Correcting Output Code (ECOC) approach. The multiclass classification task based on dysarthria level is performed using the TF features with words and diadochokinetic (DDK) speech tasks. The developed model shows an unweighted average recall (UAR) of 68.49% with the DDK task /pakata/ based on m-FDA level, and 48.8% with the word /petaka/ based on the UPDRS level using the Random Forest classifier. With the aim, to evaluate the neurological states using the dysarthria level, the developed models are used to predict the MDS-UPDRS-III level of patients. The highest matching accuracy of 32% with the word /petaka/ is achieved. Similarly, the multiclass classification framework based on MDS-UPDRS-III is applied to predict the dysarthria level of patients. In this case, the highest matching accuracy of 18% was obtained with the DDK tasks /pataka/.

An improved framework for Parkinson’s disease prediction using Variational Mode Decomposition-Hilbert spectrum of speech signal

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neuro-degenerative disease due to loss of brain cells, which produces dopamine. It is most common after Alzheimer’s disease specially seen in old age people. In the earlier stage of disease, it has been noticed that most of the people suffering from speech disorder. From last two decades many studies have been conducted for the analysis of vocal tremors in PD. This study explores the combined approach of Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) and Hilbert spectrum analysis (HSA) to investigate the voice tremor of patients with PD. A new set of features Hilbert cepstral coefficients (HCCs) are proposed in this study. Proposed features are assessed using vowels and words of PC-GITA database. The effectiveness of HCC features is utilized to perform classification, and regression analysis for PD detection. The highest average classification accuracy up to 91% and 96% is obtained with vowel /a/ and word /apto/ respectively. Further the classification accuracy up to 82% is obtained with independent dataset, when tested with the optimized model developed using PC-GITA database. In dysarthria level prediction highest correlation up to 0.82 is obtained using vowel /a/ and 0.8 with word /petaka/. The outcomes of this study indicate that the proposed articulatory features are suitable and accurate for PD assessment.

Non-negative matrix factorization-based time-frequency feature extraction of voice signal for Parkinson's disease prediction

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neuron related disorder that affects the people in old age. The majority of people suffering from PD develop several voice impairments mainly related to what is known as dysarthric speech. Voice analysis can help in PD detection and in the evaluation of the dysarthria level of the patients. This study introduces time-frequency features to model discontinuities and abrupt changes that arise in the voice signal due to PD. The proposed method consists of four stages: time-frequency matrix (TFM) representation, TFM decomposition using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), feature extraction and classification. Statistical analyses show that the proposed time-frequency features significantly differentiate between PD patients and healthy speakers. Experiments with sustained vowel phonations and isolated words of the corpus PC–GITA are conducted. The proposed method achieved average classification accuracies of up to 92% in vowels, and 97% in words. There is an improvement in accuracy ranging from 10% to 40% compared to existing methods. Further, the developed models are evaluated upon an independent dataset. Results on this separate test set show accuracies ranging from 63% to 75% in vowels, and from 53% to 75% in isolated words. Regarding the dysarthria level evaluation, Spearman's correlations between original and predicted labels are around 0.81 in sustained vowels and in isolated words. The results indicate that the proposed approach is suitable and robust for the automatic detection of PD.

Hilbert spectrum analysis for automatic detection and evaluation of Parkinson’s speech

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurological disorder that mainly affects people in old age. Abnormality in the speech signals has been reported as a biomarker to detect PD. This study explores the use of Hilbert spectrum (HS) based features to model voice impairments in people affected by PD. The instantaneous energy deviation cepstral coefficient (IEDCC) is proposed. Statistical analyses show that the proposed feature is an effective and relevant biomarker for PD detection and evaluation of the dysarthria level in speech affected by PD. The capability of the proposed features to differentiate between PD and healthy people is evaluated upon five sustained vowels and ten isolated words from the standard PC-GITA database. The average accuracy of the proposed approach ranges from 82 % to 90 % with vowels, whereas for words the average accuracy ranges between 80 % and 91 %. Besides PD detection, the dysarthria level is evaluated according to the m-FDA scale. Spearman’s correlation coefficients (ρ) are computed between the estimated m-FDA values and the original scores. Correlations of up to 0.75 are obtained with vowel/o/, while 0.77 is the highest correlation obtained with the word/reina/. The developed models are further validated with a separate and independent dataset. The classification accuracy in these additional recordings ranges between 50 % and 80 % with vowels and from 50 % to 82 % with words. The promising results obtained on the additional test set indicate that the proposed method is suitable to perform the automatic detection of PD speakers in real-world conditions.

УЧЕТ ОСОБЕННОСТЕЙ МЫШЛЕНИЯ В ПРОЦЕССЕ ЛОГОПЕДИЧЕСКОЙ РАБОТЫ ПО РАЗВИТИЮ ЛЕКСИЧЕСКОЙ СТОРОНЫ РЕЧИ У ДЕТЕЙ ДОШКОЛЬНОГО ВОЗРАСТА СО СТЕРТОЙ ДИЗАРТРИЕЙ

When dysarthria is erased, there are peculiarities in the development of lexical and grammatical order of speech. Research shows that preschool children with erased dysarthria due to early brain damage have features of sensomotor and mental development that may hinder the normal development of the lexical side of speech and thinking in these children. This fact determines the relevance of studying the development of the lexical side of speech in preschool children with erased dysarthria. The article analyzes the results of an experimental study in which 12 children from the preparatory group with erased dysarthria (level 3) took part. The author concluded that speech therapy work to correct the lexical side of speech of older preschool children with erased dysarthria would be more successful if additional thought development work was carried out with them. The high level of development of the lexical side of speech in the children of the experimental group indicates that the additional thinking development work carried out helped to enrich the vocabulary.

Towards an automatic evaluation of the dysarthria level of patients with Parkinson's disease

BackgroundParkinson's disease (PD) is a neurological disorder that produces motor and non-motor impairments. The evaluation of motor symptoms is currently performed following the third section of the Movement Disorder Society – Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS-III); however, only one item of that scale is related to speech impairments. It is necessary to develop a specific scale such that considers those aspects related to speech impairments of the patients. Aims(i) To introduce and evaluate the suitability of a modified version of the Frenchay Dysarthria Assessment (m-FDA) scale to quantify the dysarthria level of PD patients; (ii) to objectively model dysarthric speech signals considering four speech dimensions; (iii) to develop a methodology, based on speech processing and machine learning methods, to automatically quantify/predict the dysarthria level of patients with PD. MethodsThe speech recordings are modeled using features extracted from several dimensions of speech: phonation, articulation, prosody, and intelligibility. The dysarthria level is quantified using linear and non-linear regression models. Speaker models based on i-vectors are also explored. Results and conclusionsThe m-FDA scale was introduced to assess the dysarthria level of patients with PD. Articulation features extracted from continuous speech signals to create i-vectors were the most accurate to quantify the dysarthria level, with correlations of up to 0.69 between the predicted m-FDA scores and those assigned by the phoniatricians. When the dysarthria levels were estimated considering dedicated speech exercises such as rapid repetition of syllables (DDKs) and read texts, the correlations were 0.64 and 0.57, respectively. In addition, the combination of several feature sets and speech tasks improved the results, which validates the hypothesis about the contribution of information from different tasks and feature sets when assessing dysarthric speech signals. The speaker models seem to be promising to perform individual modeling for monitoring the dysarthria level of PD patients. The proposed approach may help clinicians to make more accurate and timely decisions about the evaluation and therapy associated to the dysarthria level of patients. The proposed approach is a great step towards unobtrusive/ecological evaluations of patients with dysarthric speech without the need of attending medical appointments.

Speaker models for monitoring Parkinson’s disease progression considering different communication channels and acoustic conditions

Symptoms of Parkinson’s disease vary from patient to patient. Additionally, the progression of those symptoms also differs among patients. Most of the studies on the analysis of speech of people with Parkinson’s disease do not consider such an individual variation. This paper presents a methodology for the automatic and individual monitoring of speech disorders developed by PD patients. The neurological state and dysarthria level of the patients are evaluated. The proposed system is based on individual speaker models which are created for each patient. Two different models are evaluated, the classical GMM–UBM and the i–vectors approach. These two methods are compared with respect to a baseline found with a traditional Support Vector Regressor. Different speech aspects (phonation, articulation, and prosody) are considered to model recordings of spontaneous speech and a read text. A multi-aspect coefficient is proposed with the aim of incorporating information from all of these speech aspects into a single measure. Two different scenarios are considered to assess a set with seven PD patients: (1) the longitudinal test set which consists of speech recordings captured in five recording sessions distributed from 2012 to 2016, and (2) the at-home test set which consists of speech recordings captured in the home of the same seven patients during 4 months (one day per month, four times per day). The UBM is trained with the recordings of 100 speakers (50 with Parkinson’s disease and 50 healthy speakers) captured with controlled acoustic conditions and a professional audio-setting. With the aim of evaluating the suitability of the proposed approaches and the possibility of extending this kind of systems to remotely assess the speech of the patients, a total of five different communication channels (sound-proof booth, Skype®, Hangouts®, mobile phone, and land-line) are considered to train and test the system. Due to the reduced number of recording sessions in the longitudinal test set, the experiments that involved this set are evaluated with the Pearson’s correlation. The experiments with the at-home test set are evaluated with the Spearman’s correlation. The results estimating the dysarthria level of the patients in the at-home test set indicate a correlation of 0.55 with a modified version of the Frenchay Dysarthria Assessment scale when the GMM-UBM model is applied upon the Skype® recordings. The results in the longitudinal test set indicate a correlation of 0.77 using a model based on i-vectors with recordings captured in the sound-proof-booth. The evaluation of the neurological state of the patients in the longitudinal test set shows correlations of up to 0.55 with the Movement Disorder Society - Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale also using models based on i-vectors created with Skype® recordings. These results suggest that the i–vector approach is suitable when the acoustic conditions among recording sessions differ (longitudinal test set). The GMM-UBM approach seems to be more suitable when the acoustic conditions do not change a lot among recording sessions (at-home test set). Particularly, the best results were obtained with the Skype® calls, which can be explained due to several preprocessing stages that this codec applies to the audio signals. In general, the results suggest that the proposed approaches are suitable for tele-monitoring the dysarthria level and the neurological state of PD patients.

NeuroSpeech: An open-source software for Parkinson's speech analysis

A new software for modeling pathological speech signals is presented in this paper. The software is called NeuroSpeech. This software enables the analysis of pathological speech signals considering different speech dimensions: phonation, articulation, prosody, and intelligibility. All the methods considered in the software have been validated in previous experiments and publications. The current version of NeuroSpeech was developed to model dysarthric speech signals from people with Parkinson's disease; however, the structure of the software allows other computer scientists or developers to include other pathologies and/or other measures in order to complement the existing options. Three different tasks can be performed with the current version of the software: (1) the modeling of the speech recordings considering the aforementioned speech dimensions, (2) the automatic discrimination of Parkinson's vs. non-Parkinson's speech signals (if the user has access to recordings of other pathologies, he/she can re-train the system to perform the detection of other diseases), and (3) the prediction of the neurological state of the patient according to the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) score. The prediction of the dysarthria level according to the Frenchay Dysarthria Assessment scale is also provided (the user can also train the system to perform the prediction of other kind of scales or degrees of severity).To the best of our knowledge, this is the first software with the characteristics described above, and we consider that it will help other researchers to contribute to the state-of-the-art in pathological speech assessment from different perspectives, e.g., from the clinical point of view for interpretation, and from the computer science point of view enabling the test of different measures and pattern recognition techniques.

Characterisation of voice quality of Parkinson’s disease using differential phonological posterior features

Change in voice quality (VQ) is one of the first precursors of Parkinson’s disease (PD). Specifically, impacted phonation and articulation causes the patient to have a breathy, husky-semiwhisper and hoarse voice. A goal of this paper is to characterise a VQ spectrum – the composition of non-modal phonations – of voice in PD. The paper relates non-modal healthy phonations: breathy, creaky, tense, falsetto and harsh, with disordered phonation in PD. First, statistics are learned to differentiate the modal and non-modal phonations. Statistics are computed using phonological posteriors, the probabilities of phonological features inferred from the speech signal using a deep learning approach. Second, statistics of disordered speech are learned from PD speech data comprising 50 patients and 50 healthy controls. Third, Euclidean distance is used to calculate similarity of non-modal and disordered statistics, and the inverse of the distances is used to obtain the composition of non-modal phonation in PD. Thus, pathological voice quality is characterised using healthy non-modal voice quality “base/eigenspace”. The obtained results are interpreted as the voice of an average patient with PD and can be characterised by the voice quality spectrum composed of 30% breathy voice, 23% creaky voice, 20% tense voice, 15% falsetto voice and 12% harsh voice. In addition, the proposed features were applied for prediction of the dysarthria level according to the Frenchay assessment score related to the larynx, and significant improvement is obtained for reading speech task. The proposed characterisation of VQ might also be applied to other kinds of pathological speech.