Pathological Voice Signal Analysis Using Machine Learning Based Approaches

Voice signal analysis is becoming one of the most significant examination in clinical practice due to the importance of extracting related parameters to reflect the patient's health. In this regard, various acoustic studies have been revealed that the analysis of laryngeal, respiratory and articulatory function may be efficient as an early indicator in the diagnosis of Parkinson disease (PD). PD is a common chronic neurodegenerative disorder, which affects a central nervous system and it is characterized by progressive loss of muscle control. Tremor, movement and speech disorders are the main symptoms of PD. The diagnosis decision of PD is obtained by continued clinical observation which relies on expert human observer. Therefore, an additional diagnosis method is desirable for most comfortable and timely detection of PD as well as faster treatment is needed. In this study, we develop and validate automated classification algorithms, which are based on Naive Bayes and K- Nearest Neighbors (KNN) using voice signal measurements to predict PD. According to the results, the diagnostic performance provided by the automated classification algorithm using Naive Bayes was superior to that of the KNN and it is useful as a predictive tool for PD screening with a high degree of accuracy, approximately 93.3%.