BACKGROUND
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a long-term neurodegenerative disease of the central nervous system. The current diagnosis is dependent on clinical observation and the abilities and experience of a trained specialist. One of the symptoms that affect most patients over the course of their illness is voice impairment.
OBJECTIVE
Voice is one of the non-invasive data that can be collected remotely for diagnosis and disease progression monitoring. In this study, we analyzed voice recording data from a smartphone as a possible disease biomarker. The dataset is from one of the largest mobile PD studies, the mPower study.
METHODS
A total of 29,798 audio clips from 4,051 participants were used for the analysis. The voice recordings were from sustained phonation by the participant saying /aa/ for ten seconds into the iPhone microphone. The audio samples were converted to a spectrogram using a short-time Fourier transform. CNN models were then applied to classify the samples.
RESULTS
A total of 29,798 audio clips from 4,051 participants were used for the analysis. The voice recordings were from sustained phonation by the participant saying /aa/ for ten seconds into the iPhone microphone. The audio samples were converted to a spectrogram using a short-time Fourier transform. CNN models were then applied to classify the samples.
CONCLUSIONS
Classification accuracies of the proposed method with LeNet-5, ResNet-50, and VGGNet-16 are 97.7 ± 0.1%, 98.6 ± 0.2%, and 99.3 ± 0.1%, respectively.
CLINICALTRIAL
ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02696603; https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02696603