Graph Neural Networks for Parkinsons Disease Detection

Despite the promising performance of state of the art approaches for Parkinsons Disease (PD) detection, these approaches often analyze individual speech segments in isolation, which can lead to suboptimal results. Dysarthric cues that characterize speech impairments from PD patients are expected to be related across segments from different speakers. Isolated segment analysis fails to exploit these inter segment relationships. Additionally, not all speech segments from PD patients exhibit clear dysarthric symptoms, introducing label noise that can negatively affect the performance and generalizability of current approaches. To address these challenges, we propose a novel PD detection framework utilizing Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). By representing speech segments as nodes and capturing the similarity between segments through edges, our GCN model facilitates the aggregation of dysarthric cues across the graph, effectively exploiting segment relationships and mitigating the impact of label noise. Experimental results demonstrate theadvantages of the proposed GCN model for PD detection and provide insights into its underlying mechanisms

Suppressing Noise Disparity in Training Data for Automatic Pathological Speech Detection

Although automatic pathological speech detection approaches show promising results when clean recordings are available, they are vulnerable to additive noise. Recently it has been shown that databases commonly used to develop and evaluate such approaches are noisy, with the noise characteristics between healthy and pathological recordings being different. Consequently, automatic approaches trained on these databases often learn to discriminate noise rather than speech pathology. This paper introduces a method to mitigate this noise disparity in training data. Using noise estimates from recordings from one group of speakers to augment recordings from the other group, the noise characteristics become consistent across all recordings. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of this approach in mitigating noise disparity in training data, thereby enabling automatic pathological speech detection to focus on pathology-discriminant cues rather than noise-discriminant ones.

Impact of Speech Mode in Automatic Pathological Speech Detection

Automatic pathological speech detection approaches yield promising results in identifying various pathologies. These approaches are typically designed and evaluated for phonetically-controlled speech scenarios, where speakers are prompted to articulate identical phonetic content. While gathering controlled speech recordings can be laborious, spontaneous speech can be conveniently acquired as potential patients navigate their daily routines. Further, spontaneous speech can be valuable in detecting subtle and abstract cues of pathological speech. Nonetheless, the efficacy of automatic pathological speech detection for spontaneous speech remains unexplored. This paper analyzes the influence of speech mode on pathological speech detection approaches, examining two distinct categories of approaches, i.e., classical machine learning and deep learning. Results indicate that classical approaches may struggle to capture pathology-discriminant cues in spontaneous speech. In contrast, deep learning approaches demonstrate superior performance, managing to extract additional cues that were previously inaccessible in non-spontaneous speech

On using the UA-Speech and TORGO databases to validate automatic dysarthric speech classification approaches

Although the UA-Speech and TORGO databases of control and dysarthric speech are invaluable resources made available to the research community with the objective of developing robust automatic speech recognition systems, they have also been used to validate a considerable number of automatic dysarthric speech classification approaches. Such approaches typically rely on the underlying assumption that recordings from control and dysarthric speakers are collected in the same noiseless environment using the same recording setup. In this paper, we show that this assumption is violated for the UA-Speech and TORGO databases. Using voice activity detection to extract speech and non-speech segments, we show that the majority of state-of-the-art dysarthria classification approaches achieve the same or a considerably better performance when using the non-speech segments of these databases than when using the speech segments. These results demonstrate that such approaches trained and validated on the UA-Speech and TORGO databases are potentially learning characteristics of the recording environment or setup rather than dysarthric speech characteristics. We hope that these results raise awareness in the research community about the importance of the quality of recordings when developing and evaluating automatic dysarthria classification approaches.

Experimental investigation on STFT phase representations for deep learning-based dysarthric speech detection

Mainstream deep learning-based dysarthric speech detection approaches typically rely on processing the magnitude spectrum of the short-time Fourier transform of input signals, while ignoring the phase spectrum. Although considerable insight about the structure of a signal can be obtained from the magnitude spectrum, the phase spectrum also contains inherent structures which are not immediately apparent due to phase discontinuity. To reveal meaningful phase structures, alternative phase representations such as the modified group delay (MGD) spectrum and the instantaneous frequency (IF) spectrum have been investigated in several applications. The objective of this paper is to investigate the applicability of the unprocessed phase, MGD, and IF spectra for dysarthric speech detection. Experimental results show that dysarthric cues are present in all considered phase representations. Further, it is shown that using phase representations as complementary features to the magnitude spectrum is very beneficial for deep learning-based dysarthric speech detection, with the combination of magnitude and IF spectra yielding a very high performance. The presented results should raise awareness in the research community about the potential of the phase spectrum for dysarthric speech detection and motivate further research into novel architectures that optimally exploit magnitude and phase information.

Temporal envelope and fine structure cues for dysarthric speech detection using CNNs

Deep learning-based techniques for automatic dysarthric speech detection have recently attracted interest in the research community. State-of-the-art techniques typically learn neurotypical and dysarthric discriminative representations by processing time-frequency input representations such as the magnitude spectrum of the short-time Fourier transform (STFT). Although these techniques are expected to leverage perceptual dysarthric cues, representations such as the magnitude spectrum of the STFT do not necessarily convey perceptual aspects of complex sounds. Inspired by the temporal processing mechanisms of the human auditory system, in this paper we factor signals into the product of a slowly varying envelope and a rapidly varying fine structure. Separately exploiting the different perceptual cues present in the envelope (i.e., phonetic information, stress, and voicing) and fine structure (i.e., pitch, vowel quality, and breathiness), two discriminative representations are learned through a convolutional neural network and used for automatic dysarthric speech detection. Experimental results show that processing both the envelope and fine structure representations yields a considerably better dysarthric speech detection performance than processing only the envelope, fine structure, or magnitude spectrum of the STFT representation.

Supervised Speech Representation Learning for Parkinson's Disease Classification

Recently proposed automatic pathological speech classification techniques use unsupervised auto-encoders to obtain a high-level abstract representation of speech. Since these representations are learned based on reconstructing the input, there is no guarantee that they are robust to pathology-unrelated cues such as speaker identity information. Further, these representations are not necessarily discriminative for pathology detection. In this paper, we exploit supervised auto-encoders to extract robust and discriminative speech representations for Parkinson's disease classification. To reduce the influence of speaker variabilities unrelated to pathology, we propose to obtain speaker identity-invariant representations by adversarial training of an auto-encoder and a speaker identification task. To obtain a discriminative representation, we propose to jointly train an auto-encoder and a pathological speech classifier. Experimental results on a Spanish database show that the proposed supervised representation learning methods yield more robust and discriminative representations for automatically classifying Parkinson's disease speech, outperforming the baseline unsupervised representation learning system.