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Alty J, Goldberg LR, Roccati E, Lawler K, Bai Q, Huang G, Bindoff AD, Li R, Wang X, St George RJ, Rudd K, Bartlett L, Collins JM, Aiyede M, Fernando N, Bhagwat A, Giffard J, Salmon K, McDonald S, King AE, Vickers JC. Development of a smartphone screening test for preclinical Alzheimer's disease and validation across the dementia continuum. BMC Neurol 2024; 24:127. [PMID: 38627686 PMCID: PMC11020184 DOI: 10.1186/s12883-024-03609-z] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/05/2024] [Accepted: 03/21/2024] [Indexed: 04/19/2024] Open
Abstract
BACKGROUND Dementia prevalence is predicted to triple to 152 million globally by 2050. Alzheimer's disease (AD) constitutes 70% of cases. There is an urgent need to identify individuals with preclinical AD, a 10-20-year period of progressive brain pathology without noticeable cognitive symptoms, for targeted risk reduction. Current tests of AD pathology are either too invasive, specialised or expensive for population-level assessments. Cognitive tests are normal in preclinical AD. Emerging evidence demonstrates that movement analysis is sensitive to AD across the disease continuum, including preclinical AD. Our new smartphone test, TapTalk, combines analysis of hand and speech-like movements to detect AD risk. This study aims to [1] determine which combinations of hand-speech movement data most accurately predict preclinical AD [2], determine usability, reliability, and validity of TapTalk in cognitively asymptomatic older adults and [3], prospectively validate TapTalk in older adults who have cognitive symptoms against cognitive tests and clinical diagnoses of Mild Cognitive Impairment and AD dementia. METHODS Aim 1 will be addressed in a cross-sectional study of at least 500 cognitively asymptomatic older adults who will complete computerised tests comprising measures of hand motor control (finger tapping) and oro-motor control (syllabic diadochokinesis). So far, 1382 adults, mean (SD) age 66.20 (7.65) years, range 50-92 (72.07% female) have been recruited. Motor measures will be compared to a blood-based AD biomarker, phosphorylated tau 181 to develop an algorithm that classifies preclinical AD risk. Aim 2 comprises three sub-studies in cognitively asymptomatic adults: (i) a cross-sectional study of 30-40 adults to determine the validity of data collection from different types of smartphones, (ii) a prospective cohort study of 50-100 adults ≥ 50 years old to determine usability and test-retest reliability, and (iii) a prospective cohort study of ~1,000 adults ≥ 50 years old to validate against cognitive measures. Aim 3 will be addressed in a cross-sectional study of ~200 participants with cognitive symptoms to validate TapTalk against Montreal Cognitive Assessment and interdisciplinary consensus diagnosis. DISCUSSION This study will establish the precision of TapTalk to identify preclinical AD and estimate risk of cognitive decline. If accurate, this innovative smartphone app will enable low-cost, accessible screening of individuals for AD risk. This will have wide applications in public health initiatives and clinical trials. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT06114914, 29 October 2023. Retrospectively registered.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jane Alty
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Liverpool Street, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia.
- School of Medicine, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia.
- Royal Hobart Hospital, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia.
| | - Lynette R Goldberg
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Liverpool Street, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
| | - Eddy Roccati
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Liverpool Street, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
| | - Katherine Lawler
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Liverpool Street, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
- School of Allied Health, Human Services and Sport, La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC, 3086, Australia
| | - Quan Bai
- School of Information and Communication Technology, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, 7005, Australia
| | - Guan Huang
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Liverpool Street, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
| | - Aidan D Bindoff
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Liverpool Street, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
| | - Renjie Li
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Liverpool Street, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
- School of Information and Communication Technology, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, 7005, Australia
| | - Xinyi Wang
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Liverpool Street, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
| | - Rebecca J St George
- School of Psychological Sciences, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, 7005, Australia
| | - Kaylee Rudd
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Liverpool Street, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
| | - Larissa Bartlett
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Liverpool Street, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
| | - Jessica M Collins
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Liverpool Street, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
| | - Mimieveshiofuo Aiyede
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Liverpool Street, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
| | | | - Anju Bhagwat
- Royal Hobart Hospital, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
| | - Julia Giffard
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Liverpool Street, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
| | - Katharine Salmon
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Liverpool Street, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
- Royal Hobart Hospital, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
| | - Scott McDonald
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Liverpool Street, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
| | - Anna E King
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Liverpool Street, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
| | - James C Vickers
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Liverpool Street, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia
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Wu JH, Zhang SQ, Jiang Y, Zhou ZH. Theoretical Exploration of Flexible Transmitter Model. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL NETWORKS AND LEARNING SYSTEMS 2024; 35:3674-3688. [PMID: 37494173 DOI: 10.1109/tnnls.2022.3195909] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 07/28/2023]
Abstract
Neural network models generally involve two important components, i.e., network architecture and neuron model. Although there are abundant studies about network architectures, only a few neuron models have been developed, such as the MP neuron model developed in 1943 and the spiking neuron model developed in the 1950s. Recently, a new bio-plausible neuron model, flexible transmitter (FT) model (Zhang and Zhou, 2021), has been proposed. It exhibits promising behaviors, particularly on temporal-spatial signals, even when simply embedded into the common feedforward network architecture. This article attempts to understand the properties of the FT network (FTNet) theoretically. Under mild assumptions, we show that: 1) FTNet is a universal approximator; 2) the approximation complexity of FTNet can be exponentially smaller than those of commonly used real-valued neural networks with feedforward/recurrent architectures and is of the same order in the worst case; and 3) any local minimum of FTNet is the global minimum, implying that it is possible to identify global minima by local search algorithms.
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Li D, Butala AA, Moro-Velazquez L, Meyer T, Oh ES, Motley C, Villalba J, Dehak N. Automating the analysis of eye movement for different neurodegenerative disorders. Comput Biol Med 2024; 170:107951. [PMID: 38219646 DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2024.107951] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/03/2023] [Revised: 12/08/2023] [Accepted: 01/01/2024] [Indexed: 01/16/2024]
Abstract
The clinical observation and assessment of extra-ocular movements is common practice in assessing neurodegenerative disorders but remains observer-dependent. In the present study, we propose an algorithm that can automatically identify saccades, fixation, smooth pursuit, and blinks using a non-invasive eye tracker. Subsequently, response-to-stimuli-derived interpretable features were elicited that objectively and quantitatively assess patient behaviors. The cohort analysis encompasses persons with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), Parkinson's disease mimics (PDM), and controls (CTRL). Overall, results suggested that the AD/MCI and PD groups had significantly different saccade and pursuit characteristics compared to CTRL when the target moved faster or covered a larger visual angle during smooth pursuit. These two groups also displayed more omitted antisaccades and longer average antisaccade latency than CTRL. When reading a text passage silently, people with AD/MCI had more fixations. During visual exploration, people with PD demonstrated a more variable saccade duration than other groups. In the prosaccade task, the PD group showed a significantly smaller average hypometria gain and accuracy, with the most statistical significance and highest AUC scores of features studied. The minimum saccade gain was a PD-specific feature different from CTRL and PDM. These features, as oculographic biomarkers, can be potentially leveraged in distinguishing different types of NDs, yielding more objective and precise protocols to diagnose and monitor disease progression.
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Affiliation(s)
- Deming Li
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 21218, MD, USA.
| | - Ankur A Butala
- Department of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, 21205, MD, USA
| | - Laureano Moro-Velazquez
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 21218, MD, USA
| | - Trevor Meyer
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 21218, MD, USA
| | - Esther S Oh
- Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, 21205, MD, USA
| | - Chelsey Motley
- Department of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, 21205, MD, USA
| | - Jesús Villalba
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 21218, MD, USA
| | - Najim Dehak
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 21218, MD, USA
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Yitbarek GY, Alty J, Lawler K, Goldberg LR. Current evidence on the association of tongue strength with cognitive decline in older adults and the known risk factors of frailty, sarcopenia and nutritional health: a scoping review protocol. BMJ Open 2023; 13:e076005. [PMID: 37898485 PMCID: PMC10619116 DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2023-076005] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/30/2023] Open
Abstract
INTRODUCTION Evidence suggests that the pathology underlying cognitive decline leading to dementia begins 15-20 years before cognitive symptoms emerge. Thus, identifying biomarkers in this preclinical phase is critically important. Age-related decrease in muscle mass and strength, a known risk factor for sarcopenia, frailty and cognitive decline, also affects the tongue. This paper describes an a priori protocol by a multidisciplinary team to address the following questions relating to adults ≥50 years of age: (1) What is the current evidence on the association of tongue strength with cognitive decline? (2) How does tongue strength associate with frailty and sarcopenia? (3) What is the association of tongue strength with nutritional health? METHODS AND ANALYSIS Search terms will be identified then multiple electronic databases (PubMed, PsycINFO (Ovid), Scopus, Embase (Ovid), CINAHL and Web of Science) searched systematically for peer-reviewed articles published in English that address the following inclusion criteria: (1) human studies, (2) participants ≥50 years of age and (3) studies with tongue pressure values measured in relation to at least one of the following: frailty, sarcopenia, nutritional health, cognitive function and dementia (Alzheimer's, vascular, frontotemporal and Lewy body). Grey literature also will be searched to identify additional studies, clinical trials and policy papers appropriate for inclusion. The search will be from database inception. After removing duplicates, two research team members will independently screen abstracts and identify articles for full-text review. The team will use a data charting tool for data extraction. Data will be analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION The scoping review does not require ethics approval as data will be from publicly available sources. Results will be disseminated in workshops and conferences and a peer-reviewed journal paper.
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Affiliation(s)
- Getachew Yideg Yitbarek
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
- Biomedical Sciences Department (Medical Physiology Unit), College of Medicine and Health Science, Debre Tabor University, Debre Tabor, Ethiopia
| | - Jane Alty
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
- School of Medicine, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
- Neurology Department, Royal Hobart Hospital, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
| | - Katherine Lawler
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
- School of Allied Health, Human Services and Sport, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
| | - Lynette Ruth Goldberg
- Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
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Qi X, Zhou Q, Dong J, Bao W. Noninvasive automatic detection of Alzheimer's disease from spontaneous speech: a review. Front Aging Neurosci 2023; 15:1224723. [PMID: 37693647 PMCID: PMC10484224 DOI: 10.3389/fnagi.2023.1224723] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/18/2023] [Accepted: 08/04/2023] [Indexed: 09/12/2023] Open
Abstract
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is considered as one of the leading causes of death among people over the age of 70 that is characterized by memory degradation and language impairment. Due to language dysfunction observed in individuals with AD patients, the speech-based methods offer non-invasive, convenient, and cost-effective solutions for the automatic detection of AD. This paper systematically reviews the technologies to detect the onset of AD from spontaneous speech, including data collection, feature extraction and classification. First the paper formulates the task of automatic detection of AD and describes the process of data collection. Then, feature extractors from speech data and transcripts are reviewed, which mainly contains acoustic features from speech and linguistic features from text. Especially, general handcrafted features and deep embedding features are organized from different modalities. Additionally, this paper summarizes optimization strategies for AD detection systems. Finally, the paper addresses challenges related to data size, model explainability, reliability and multimodality fusion, and discusses potential research directions based on these challenges.
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Affiliation(s)
- Xiaoke Qi
- School of Information Management for Law, China University of Political Science and Law, Beijing, China
| | | | - Jian Dong
- Information Technology Research Center, China Electronics Standardization Institute, Beijing, China
| | - Wei Bao
- Information Technology Research Center, China Electronics Standardization Institute, Beijing, China
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Detecting dementia from speech and transcripts using transformers. COMPUT SPEECH LANG 2023. [DOI: 10.1016/j.csl.2023.101485] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/15/2023]
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Elbéji A, Zhang L, Higa E, Fischer A, Despotovic V, Nazarov PV, Aguayo G, Fagherazzi G. Vocal biomarker predicts fatigue in people with COVID-19: results from the prospective Predi-COVID cohort study. BMJ Open 2022; 12:e062463. [PMID: 36414294 PMCID: PMC9684280 DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2022-062463] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/23/2022] Open
Abstract
OBJECTIVE To develop a vocal biomarker for fatigue monitoring in people with COVID-19. DESIGN Prospective cohort study. SETTING Predi-COVID data between May 2020 and May 2021. PARTICIPANTS A total of 1772 voice recordings were used to train an AI-based algorithm to predict fatigue, stratified by gender and smartphone's operating system (Android/iOS). The recordings were collected from 296 participants tracked for 2 weeks following SARS-CoV-2 infection. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES Four machine learning algorithms (logistic regression, k-nearest neighbours, support vector machine and soft voting classifier) were used to train and derive the fatigue vocal biomarker. The models were evaluated based on the following metrics: area under the curve (AUC), accuracy, F1-score, precision and recall. The Brier score was also used to evaluate the models' calibrations. RESULTS The final study population included 56% of women and had a mean (±SD) age of 40 (±13) years. Women were more likely to report fatigue (p<0.001). We developed four models for Android female, Android male, iOS female and iOS male users with a weighted AUC of 86%, 82%, 79%, 85% and a mean Brier Score of 0.15, 0.12, 0.17, 0.12, respectively. The vocal biomarker derived from the prediction models successfully discriminated COVID-19 participants with and without fatigue. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrates the feasibility of identifying and remotely monitoring fatigue thanks to voice. Vocal biomarkers, digitally integrated into telemedicine technologies, are expected to improve the monitoring of people with COVID-19 or Long-COVID. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER NCT04380987.
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Affiliation(s)
- Abir Elbéji
- Department of Precision Health, Luxembourg Institute of Health, 1A-B, rue Thomas Edison, L-1445 Strassen, Luxembourg
| | - Lu Zhang
- Department of Precision Health, Luxembourg Institute of Health, 1A-B, rue Thomas Edison, L-1445 Strassen, Luxembourg
| | - Eduardo Higa
- Department of Precision Health, Luxembourg Institute of Health, 1A-B, rue Thomas Edison, L-1445 Strassen, Luxembourg
| | - Aurélie Fischer
- Department of Precision Health, Luxembourg Institute of Health, 1A-B, rue Thomas Edison, L-1445 Strassen, Luxembourg
| | - Vladimir Despotovic
- Bioinformatics Platform, Luxembourg Institute of Health, 1A-B, rue Thomas Edison, L-1445 Strassen, Luxembourg
| | - Petr V Nazarov
- Bioinformatics Platform, Luxembourg Institute of Health, 1A-B, rue Thomas Edison, L-1445 Strassen, Luxembourg
| | - Gloria Aguayo
- Department of Precision Health, Luxembourg Institute of Health, 1A-B, rue Thomas Edison, L-1445 Strassen, Luxembourg
| | - Guy Fagherazzi
- Department of Precision Health, Luxembourg Institute of Health, 1A-B, rue Thomas Edison, L-1445 Strassen, Luxembourg
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Liu N, Luo K, Yuan Z, Chen Y. A Transfer Learning Method for Detecting Alzheimer's Disease Based on Speech and Natural Language Processing. Front Public Health 2022; 10:772592. [PMID: 35493375 PMCID: PMC9043451 DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.772592] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/08/2021] [Accepted: 02/24/2022] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease that is difficult to be detected using convenient and reliable methods. The language change in patients with AD is an important signal of their cognitive status, which potentially helps in early diagnosis. In this study, we developed a transfer learning model based on speech and natural language processing (NLP) technology for the early diagnosis of AD. The lack of large datasets limits the use of complex neural network models without feature engineering, while transfer learning can effectively solve this problem. The transfer learning model is firstly pre-trained on large text datasets to get the pre-trained language model, and then, based on such a model, an AD classification model is performed on small training sets. Concretely, a distilled bidirectional encoder representation (distilBert) embedding, combined with a logistic regression classifier, is used to distinguish AD from normal controls. The model experiment was evaluated on Alzheimer's dementia recognition through spontaneous speech datasets in 2020, including the balanced 78 healthy controls (HC) and 78 patients with AD. The accuracy of the proposed model is 0.88, which is almost equivalent to the champion score in the challenge and a considerable improvement over the baseline of 75% established by organizers of the challenge. As a result, the transfer learning method in this study improves AD prediction, which does not only reduces the need for feature engineering but also addresses the lack of sufficiently large datasets.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ning Liu
- School of Public Health, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China
- Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Data-Intensive Computing, Quanzhou Normal University, Quanzhou, China
| | - Kexue Luo
- Tongde Hospital of Zhejiang Province Geriatrics, Hangzhou, China
| | - Zhenming Yuan
- School of Information Science and Technology, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China
| | - Yan Chen
- International Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome and Consciousness Science Institute, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China
- *Correspondence: Yan Chen
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Abstract
The highly contagious and rapidly mutating COVID-19 virus is affecting individuals worldwide. A rapid and large-scale method for COVID-19 testing is needed to prevent infection. Cough testing using AI has been shown to be potentially valuable. In this paper, we propose a COVID-19 diagnostic method based on an AI cough test. We used only crowdsourced cough sound data to distinguish between the cough sound of COVID-19-positive people and that of healthy people. First, we used the COUGHVID cough database to segment only the cough sound from the original cough data. An effective audio feature set was then extracted from the segmented cough sounds. A deep learning model was trained on the extracted feature set. The COVID-19 diagnostic system constructed using this method had a sensitivity of 93% and a specificity of 94%, and achieved better results than models trained by other existing methods.
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