Computer‐based evaluation of Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment patients during a picture description task

Abstract

Introduction We present a methodology to automatically evaluate the performance of patients during picture description tasks. Methods Transcriptions and audio recordings of the Cookie Theft picture description task were used. With 25 healthy elderly control (HC) samples and an information coverage measure, we automatically generated a population-specific referent. We then assessed 517 transcriptions (257 Alzheimer's disease [AD], 217 HC, and 43 mild cognitively impaired samples) according to their informativeness and pertinence against this referent. We extracted linguistic and phonetic metrics which previous literature correlated to early-stage AD. We trained two learners to distinguish HCs from cognitively impaired individuals. Results Our measures significantly ( P < .001) correlated with the severity of the cognitive impairment and the Mini–Mental State Examination score. The classification sensitivity was 81% (area under the curve of receiver operating characteristics = 0.79) and 85% (area under the curve of receiver operating characteristics = 0.76) between HCs and AD and between HCs and AD and mild cognitively impaired, respectively. Discussion An automated assessment of a picture description task could assist clinicians in the detection of early signs of cognitive impairment and AD.

Speech Analysis by Natural Language Processing Techniques: A Possible Tool for Very Early Detection of Cognitive Decline?

“…Studies dedicated to evaluate early language signs in prodromal or preclinical stages, such as MCI (Taler and Phillips, 2008 ; Drummond et al, 2015 ; Szatloczki et al, 2015 ; Hernández-Domínguez et al, 2018 ), reports inhomogeneous results. For example some authors described significant differences between controls and MCI in semantic fluency and naming tests (Ostberg et al, 2005 ; Duong et al, 2006 ; Radanovic et al, 2007 ; Cuetos et al, 2009 ; Joubert et al, 2010 ; Ahmed et al, 2013 ; Mueller et al, 2016 ), while others did not confirm differences in Boston Naming, semantic and phonemic verbal fluency (Bschor et al, 2001 ).…”

“…Other groups of researchers have applied the analysis of discourse on verbal productions recorded during the classic episodic memory tests as the Wechsler logical memory (Roark et al, 2007 , 2011 ). The most ambitious studies have also used analytical tools applicable directly on the voice recordings of subjects (Meilán et al, 2014 ), showing a good correlation between the automated classification and that based on clinical and manual data processing (Roark et al, 2011 ; Satt et al, 2013 ; Hernández-Domínguez et al, 2018 ).…”

An Assessment of Paralinguistic Acoustic Features for Detection of Alzheimer's Dementia in Spontaneous Speech

“…Fraser et al [29] carried out additional prosodic analysis on the Pitt recordings, extracting 42 melfrequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features [30]. Others have used a similar approach [31], [32]. Another recent study 1 Data available at DementiaBank, http://dementia.talkbank.org/ successfully used these recordings to extract low-level speech features (vocalisation events and speech rate) and used them to train a system for AD detection [33].…”

El análisis de las relaciones discursivas como recurso en el seguimiento de la Enfermedad de Alzheimer

“…Es por esto que la variedad de fenómenos en los diferentes niveles de la lengua han motivado nuevos estudios cuyo fin es conformar un catálogo exacto de las características lingüísticas más afectadas o mejor preservadas durante la DTA (Fraser, Meltzer & Rudzicz, 2016;Asgari, Kaye & Dodge, 2017;Hernández-Domínguez, Ratté, Sierra-Martínez & Roche-Bergua, 2018;Toledo, Aluísio, dos Santos, Brucki, Trés, de Oliveira & Mansur, 2018;Toth, Hoffmann, Gosztolya, Vincze, Szatloczki, Banreti & Kálmán, 2018) para dar cuenta del impacto de la demencia en el procesamiento cognitivo de acuerdo a cada etapa (de Lira, Ortiz, Campanha, Bertolucci & Minett, 2011;Ahmed, Haigh, Jager & Garrard, 2013).…”