Improving Alzheimer's Disease Detection for Speech Based on Feature Purification Network

The Emerging Science of Interacting Minds

For over a century, psychology has focused on uncovering mental processes of a single individual. However, humans rarely navigate the world in isolation. The most important determinants of successful development, mental health, and our individual traits and preferences arise from interacting with other individuals. Social interaction underpins who we are, how we think, and how we behave. Here we discuss the key methodological challenges that have limited progress in establishing a robust science of how minds interact and the new tools that are beginning to overcome these challenges. A deep understanding of the human mind requires studying the context within which it originates and exists: social interaction.

A new method for vascular age estimation based on relative risk difference in vascular aging

OBJECTIVE

The current models of estimating vascular age (VA) primarily rely on the regression label expressed with chronological age (CA), which does not account individual differences in vascular aging (IDVA) that are difficult to describe by CA. This may lead to inaccuracies in assessing the risk of cardiovascular disease based on VA. To address this limitation, this work aims to develop a new method for estimating VA by considering IDVA. This method will provide a more accurate assessment of cardiovascular disease risk.

METHODS

Relative risk difference in vascular aging (RRDVA) is proposed to replace IDVA, which is represented as the numerical difference between individual predicted age (PA) and the corresponding mean PA of healthy population. RRDVA and CA are regard as the influence factors to acquire VA. In order to acquire PA of all samples, this work takes CA as the dependent variable, and mines the two most representative indicators from arteriosclerosis data as the independent variables, to establish a regression model for obtaining PA.

RESULTS

The proposed VA based on RRDVA is significantly correlated with 27 indirect indicators for vascular aging evaluation. Moreover, VA is better than CA by comparing the correlation coefficients between VA, CA and 27 indirect indicators, and RRDVA greater than zero presents a higher risk of disease.

CONCLUSION

The proposed VA overcomes the limitation of CA in characterizing IDVA, which may help young groups with high disease risk to promote healthy behaviors.

Learning implicit sentiments in Alzheimer's disease recognition with contextual attention features

Background

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is difficult to diagnose on the basis of language because of the implicit emotion of transcripts, which is defined as a supervised fuzzy implicit emotion classification at the document level. Recent neural network-based approaches have not paid attention to the implicit sentiments entailed in AD transcripts.

Method

A two-level attention mechanism is proposed to detect deep semantic information toward words and sentences, which enables it to attend to more words and fewer sentences differentially when constructing document representation. Specifically, a document vector was built by progressively aggregating important words into sentence vectors and important sentences into document vectors.

Results

Experimental results showed that our method achieved the best accuracy of 91.6% on annotated public Pitt corpora, which validates its effectiveness in learning implicit sentiment representation for our model.

Conclusion

The proposed model can qualitatively select informative words and sentences using attention layers, and this method also provides good inspiration for AD diagnosis based on implicit sentiment transcripts.