Researchers are working to enable early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease using machine learning (ML) models. This model could one day turn into a simple screening tool for anyone with a smartphone.
The model can distinguish Alzheimer’s patients from healthy controls with an accuracy of 70-75 percent, an encouraging figure for the more than 747,000 Canadians with Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia. is.
Dementia of the Alzheimer’s type can be difficult to detect in its early stages because it often begins with very subtle symptoms that can be confused with memory-related problems that are typical of older people. . But, as the researchers point out, the earlier potential problems are detected, the sooner patients can take action.
“Previously, detecting changes in the brain required lab work and medical imaging. No,” says Eleni Stroria, a professor in the Department of Computing Sciences who helped create the model.
“If we could use mobile phones to see early signs, we would be able to understand the patient-physician relationship. You could start with and slow it down.”
Screening tools do not replace medical professionals. However, in addition to helping with early detection, telemedicine is a convenient way to identify potential concerns for patients who may face geographic or language barriers in accessing services within their community. Born, explains Zela Shah, a master’s student in the Department of Computing. Scientist and lead author of the paper.
“With this kind of technology, you can think about triaging patients based entirely on their voice,” says Shah.
While the research group has previously investigated the language used by people with Alzheimer’s disease, in this project they investigated language-independent acoustic and verbal speech characteristics rather than specific words.
“The original job was to listen and understand what they said, which is a computationally easier problem to solve,” says Stroulia. “Now we’re saying listen to the voice. There are some properties of the way people speak that go beyond language.”
“This is much stronger than the version issues we were solving before,” Stroulia adds.
The researchers started with a language trait that doctors noted was common in people with Alzheimer’s disease. These patients tended to speak more slowly and had more pauses and breaks in speech. They usually used shorter words and often had less clarity of speech. Researchers have found a way to transform these features into speech features that the model can screen.
The researchers focused on English and Greek speakers, but “the technology could be used in a variety of languages,” Shah says.
The model itself is complex, but the end user experience of the tool that incorporates it is even simpler.
“When a person talks to the tool, an analysis is made and a prediction is made. Either the person has Alzheimer’s disease or they don’t,” said contributor to the paper and professor in the Department of Computational Sciences. One Russ Greiner says: . That information is provided to health care professionals so they can determine the best course of action for the person.
Greiner and Stroria both lead the Computational Psychiatry Research Group at the University of Australia, whose members have developed similar AI models for detecting mental illnesses such as PTSD, schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder. and tools.
“All that we can do to enhance clinical processes, inform treatment, and manage disease faster and at less cost is great,” Stroulia said.
The ML model is described in the paper “Exploring Language-Agnostic Speech Representations using Domain Knowledge for Detecting Alzheimer’s Dementia” published in the ICASSP 2023 Signal Processing Grand Challenge, where the team is ranked #1 in North America and #4 worldwide it was done.
