Speech as a Biomarker for Disease Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Botelho, Catarina, Abad, Alberto, Schultz, Tanja, Trancoso, Isabel
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Botelho, Catarina
Abad, Alberto
Schultz, Tanja
Trancoso, Isabel
author_facet Botelho, Catarina
Abad, Alberto
Schultz, Tanja
Trancoso, Isabel
contents Speech is a rich biomarker that encodes substantial information about the health of a speaker, and thus it has been proposed for the detection of numerous diseases, achieving promising results. However, questions remain about what the models trained for the automatic detection of these diseases are actually learning and the basis for their predictions, which can significantly impact patients' lives. This work advocates for an interpretable health model, suitable for detecting several diseases, motivated by the observation that speech-affecting disorders often have overlapping effects on speech signals. A framework is presented that first defines "reference speech" and then leverages this definition for disease detection. Reference speech is characterized through reference intervals, i.e., the typical values of clinically meaningful acoustic and linguistic features derived from a reference population. This novel approach in the field of speech as a biomarker is inspired by the use of reference intervals in clinical laboratory science. Deviations of new speakers from this reference model are quantified and used as input to detect Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. The classification strategy explored is based on Neural Additive Models, a type of glass-box neural network, which enables interpretability. The proposed framework for reference speech characterization and disease detection is designed to support the medical community by providing clinically meaningful explanations that can serve as a valuable second opinion.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_10230
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Speech as a Biomarker for Disease Detection
Botelho, Catarina
Abad, Alberto
Schultz, Tanja
Trancoso, Isabel
Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
Speech is a rich biomarker that encodes substantial information about the health of a speaker, and thus it has been proposed for the detection of numerous diseases, achieving promising results. However, questions remain about what the models trained for the automatic detection of these diseases are actually learning and the basis for their predictions, which can significantly impact patients' lives. This work advocates for an interpretable health model, suitable for detecting several diseases, motivated by the observation that speech-affecting disorders often have overlapping effects on speech signals. A framework is presented that first defines "reference speech" and then leverages this definition for disease detection. Reference speech is characterized through reference intervals, i.e., the typical values of clinically meaningful acoustic and linguistic features derived from a reference population. This novel approach in the field of speech as a biomarker is inspired by the use of reference intervals in clinical laboratory science. Deviations of new speakers from this reference model are quantified and used as input to detect Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. The classification strategy explored is based on Neural Additive Models, a type of glass-box neural network, which enables interpretability. The proposed framework for reference speech characterization and disease detection is designed to support the medical community by providing clinically meaningful explanations that can serve as a valuable second opinion.
title Speech as a Biomarker for Disease Detection
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.10230