Parkinson’s Disease Classification Framework Using Vocal Dynamics in Connected Speech

Parkinson’s disease (PD) classification through speech has been an advancing field of research because of its ease of acquisition and processing. The minimal infrastructure requirements of the system have also made it suitable for telemonitoring applications. Researchers have studied the effects of PD on speech from various perspectives using different speech tasks. Typical speech deficits due to PD include voice monotony (e.g., monopitch), breathy or rough quality, and articulatory errors. In connected speech, these symptoms are more emphatic, which is also the basis for speech assessment in popular rating scales used for PD, like the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) and Hoehn and Yahr (HY). The current study introduces an innovative framework that integrates pitch-synchronous segmentation and an optimized set of features to investigate and analyze continuous speech from both PD patients and healthy controls (HC). Comparison of the proposed framework against existing methods has shown its superiority in classification performance and mitigation of overfitting in machine learning models. A set of optimal classifiers with unbiased decision-making was identified after comparing several machine learning models. The outcomes yielded by the classifiers demonstrate that the framework effectively learns the intrinsic characteristics of PD from connected speech, which can potentially offer valuable assistance in clinical diagnosis.