AI Taught To Recognize Alzheimer’s Patients’ Speech Patterns
The Drexel team collected 237 audio recordings of Alzheimer’s patients and healthy volunteers. The recordings were then converted to text using a pre-trained speech recognition model. The program captured meaningful characteristics of the word-use, sentence structure and meaning from the text to produce what researchers call an “embedding” – a characteristic profile of Alzheimer’s patients’ speech patterns. The researchers then used the embedding to re-train the program — turning it into an Alzheimer’s screening machine.Predicts Alzheimer’s With 80 Percent Accuracy
To test the program, the researchers asked it to review dozens of transcripts and decide whether each one was produced by someone with or without Alzheimer’s. The model was able to predict the disease with a suprising accuracy of 80.3 percent. This was significantly better than the 74.6 percent accuracy achieved when they applied a more conventional approach that relied on acoustic features painstakingly identified by human experts.Surpasses Two Other Tests
The Drexel team also compared GPT-3 with three other approaches using large language models. The program matched the top model’s performance and outshone the other two. In a final test, GPT-3 was able to accurately infer, solely based on speech data, the subject’s cognitive testing score on the Mini-Mental State Exam, a common test for predicting the severity of dementia. Hualou Liang, co-author of the study published in the journal PLOS Digital Health in December, explained, saying, “[T]his could be a simple, accessible and adequately sensitive tool for community-based testing [and] be very useful for early screening and risk assessment before a clinical diagnosis.” His fellow author Felix Agbavor added: “GPT3’s systemic approach to language analysis and production makes it a promising candidate for identifying the subtle speech characteristics that may predict the onset of dementia.”My Takeaway
GPT-3 is still relatively new technology and far from flawless. It was created in 2020 and was the culmination of extensive research by leading technology companies Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. It’s still too early to tell how mainstream medicine will practically use technology like this to detect Alzheimer’s, but any tool that’s non-invasive and reliable for early disease detection is a win in my book.Meet
The Expert:
The Expert:
Susan Clark is an award-winning, Emmy-nominated journalist and author who has written about nutrition, health, and wellness for 27 years. She has developed content for articles, reports, books, videos, and television news segments featuring some of today’s top alternative and integrative doctors. She earned a bachelor of science in broadcast journalism from Texas Christian University. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two sons, and numerous pets.
