CNN-Based Identification of Parkinson's Disease from Continuous Speech in Noisy Environments

Parkinson's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder caused by dopaminergic neuron degeneration. Parkinsonian speech impairment is one of the earliest presentations of the disease and, along with tremor, is suitable for pre-diagnosis. It is defined by hypokinetic dysarthria and accounts for respiratory, phonatory, articulatory, and prosodic manifestations. The topic of this article targets artificial-intelligence-based identification of Parkinson's disease from continuous speech recorded in a noisy environment. The novelty of this work is twofold. First, the proposed assessment workflow performed speech analysis on samples of continuous speech. Second, we analyzed and quantified Wiener filter applicability for speech denoising in the context of Parkinsonian speech identification. We argue that the Parkinsonian features of loudness, intonation, phonation, prosody, and articulation are contained in the speech, speech energy, and Mel spectrograms. Thus, the proposed workflow follows a feature-based speech assessment to determine the feature variation ranges, followed by speech classification using convolutional neural networks. We report the best classification accuracies of 96% on speech energy, 93% on speech, and 92% on Mel spectrograms. We conclude that the Wiener filter improves both feature-based analysis and convolutional-neural-network-based classification performances.