Speech-Based Supervised Learning Towards the Diagnosis of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Ricardo Cebola, Ricardo Cebola, Duarte Folgado, Duarte Folgado, André Carreiro, Hugo Gamboa, Hugo Gamboa

2023

Abstract

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) diagnosis requires extensive clinical examinations, often leading to delays and a burden to patients and their caregivers. Speech has emerged in the literature as a promising biomarker for neurodegenerative diseases capable of being integrated into telemonitoring solutions. We present a comprehensive study with several phonatory tasks and speech features to evaluate the generalisation potential of models for ALS diagnosis. We use a public dataset with sustained vowels (N=64) and data with ALS and healthy volunteers being collected from ongoing research trials (N=22). Two approaches were considered: i) sample-based, where the signals were divided into fixed-length windows, and ii) patient-based, where a voting system was implemented based on the sample-based classification of each patient. We achieved a mean diagnostic performance with an F1-score over 80%. The best scores for the sample and patient-based classifications are 96% and 100% for vowels, 96% and 95% for sentences and 82% and 87% for cough. Our findings support speech as a promising digital biomarker and pave the way for remote examination at patients’ residences, increasing the data available for clinicians for better diagnosis and prognosis of ALS.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Cebola R., Folgado D., Carreiro A. and Gamboa H. (2023). Speech-Based Supervised Learning Towards the Diagnosis of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. In Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2023) - Volume 4: BIOSIGNALS; ISBN 978-989-758-631-6, SciTePress, pages 74-85. DOI: 10.5220/0011694700003414

in Bibtex Style

@conference{biosignals23,
author={Ricardo Cebola and Duarte Folgado and André Carreiro and Hugo Gamboa},
title={Speech-Based Supervised Learning Towards the Diagnosis of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2023) - Volume 4: BIOSIGNALS},
year={2023},
pages={74-85},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011694700003414},
isbn={978-989-758-631-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2023) - Volume 4: BIOSIGNALS
TI - Speech-Based Supervised Learning Towards the Diagnosis of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
SN - 978-989-758-631-6
AU - Cebola R.
AU - Folgado D.
AU - Carreiro A.
AU - Gamboa H.
PY - 2023
SP - 74
EP - 85
DO - 10.5220/0011694700003414
PB - SciTePress