A Novel Stochastic Transformer-based Approach for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Detection using Audio Recording of Clinical Interviews

Abstract

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental disorder that can be developed after witnessing or experiencing extremely traumatic events. PTSD can affect anyone, regardless of ethnicity, or culture. An estimated one in every eleven people will experience PTSD during their lifetime. The Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS) and the PTSD Check List for Civilians (PCL-C) interviews are gold standards in the diagnosis of PTSD. These questionnaires can be fooled by the subject's responses. This work proposes a deep learning-based approach that achieves state-of-the-art performances for PTSD detection using audio recordings during clinical interviews. Our approach is based on MFCC low-level features extracted from audio recordings of clinical interviews, followed by deep high-level learning using a Stochastic Transformer. Our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performances with an RMSE of 2.92 on the eDAIC dataset thanks to the stochastic depth, stochastic deep learning layers, and stochastic activation function.