Biomarkers

Early detection of mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer's disease (MCI d/t AD), as well as AD dementia (ADD), is critical for timely intervention. Speech analysis offers a non-invasive way to detect subtle cognitive deficits. This study explores the utility of acoustic and lexical features in classifying older Korean adults across three clinical scenarios: (1) HC vs. AD (MCI d/t AD & ADD) for screening, (2) Non-dementia (HC & MCI d/t AD) vs. ADD for detecting advanced pathology, and (3) HC vs. ADD for assessing the most divergent clinical states. We aim to demonstrate the feasibility of speech-based methods for supporting more timely interventions.

We recruited 110 older Korean adults (HC=55, MCI d/t AD=29, ADD=26). Groups did not differ in gender (p = .372) or education (p = .278). However, the MCI d/t AD group was older (77.79±5.27) than the HC (72.51±6.38) and ADD (73.35±7.48) groups (p = .002), whereas there was no significant difference between HC and ADD. Cognitive measures (MMSE, CDR; both p <.001) differed significantly. All MCI d/t AD and ADD patients were beta-amyloid positive in PET scans. Speech was collected via recording from neuropsychological tests and additional tasks (Korean phonemic/semantic fluency, vowel phonation, picture description). Acoustic and lexical features were extracted with openSMILE (emobase, 988-dimensional) and a pretrained Korean RoBERTa model (768-dimensional). Principal component analysis was applied to each feature set. Three classification models were built using (1) acoustic-only, (2) lexical-only, and (3) an ensemble of acoustic and lexical features. Each model was implemented through a multilayer perceptron and evaluated with 5-fold cross-validation.

In our experiments, ensemble models outperformed single-feature-based models (Table 1). For HC vs. AD, the ensemble model achieved 75.8% accuracy and 0.756 AUC; for Non-dementia vs. ADD, 85.1% accuracy and 0.801 AUC; and for HC vs. ADD, 87.0% accuracy and 0.893 AUC. Combining acoustic and lexical features provided complementary information, reflecting vocal characteristics and language-based deficits.

These findings demonstrate that speech-derived features can detect cognitive impairment in older Korean adults across multiple diagnostic scenarios, enabling earlier and more targeted interventions. Moreover, this non-invasive approach may ease clinical workflows and broaden screening accessibility, particularly in resource-limited settings.