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Accurate telemonitoring of Parkinson’s disease progression by non-invasive speech tests

Athanasios Tsanas¹, Max A. Little¹, Patrick E. McSharry¹ & Lorraine O. Ramig²

Correspondence: (Login to view email address)

1. University of Oxford
2. University of Colorado

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Document Type:

Manuscript

Date:

Received 29 October 2009 12:52 UTC; Posted 29 October 2009

Subjects:

Neuroscience, Bioinformatics

Tags:

• Parkinson's Disease
• telemedicine
• classification and regression trees
• speech signal processing
• Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale

Abstract:

Tracking Parkinson’s disease (PD) symptom progression often uses the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS), which requires the patient’s presence in clinic, and time-consuming physical examinations by trained medical staff. Thus, symptom monitoring is costly and logistically inconvenient for patient and clinical staff alike, also hindering recruitment for future large-scale clinical trials. Here, for the first time, we demonstrate rapid, remote replication of UPDRS assessment with clinically useful accuracy (about 7.5 UPDRS points difference from the clinicians’ estimates), using only simple, self-administered, and non-invasive speech tests. We characterize speech with signal processing algorithms, extracting clinically useful features of average PD progression. Subsequently, we select the most parsimonious model with a robust feature selection algorithm, and statistically map the selected subset of features to UPDRS using linear and nonlinear regression techniques, which include classical least squares and non-parametric classification and regression trees (CART). We verify our findings on the largest database of PD speech in existence (~6,000 recordings from 42 PD patients, recruited to a six-month, multi-centre trial). These findings support the feasibility of frequent, remote and accurate UPDRS tracking. This technology could play a key part in telemonitoring frameworks that enable large-scale clinical trials into novel PD treatments.

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License:

This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

How to cite this document:

Tsanas, Athanasios, Little, Max, McSharry, Patrick, and Ramig, Lorraine. Accurate telemonitoring of Parkinson’s disease progression by non-invasive speech tests. Available from Nature Precedings <http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2009.3920.1> (2009)

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