Dr. Athanasios Tsanas (‘Thanasis’), EPSRC post-doctoral research fellow, Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics &Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Oxford

Current issues in healthcare2. Probabilistic Parkinson’s disease detection using speech signals

Centre for Doctoral Training in Healthcare Innovation

Death of dopaminergic cells in basal ganglia Dopaminergic cells facilitate motor control 60-80% dopaminergic cells have died before clinical diagnosis too late to intercept Parkinson’s disease symptom progression

No known biomarker of Parkinson’s disease (PD) Difficult diagnosis: 100% only post-mortem Speech may be one of the earliest indicators of PD onset

Early diagnosis can improve the quality of life of PD subjects Optimized treatment (hitherto no known cure available) Possibly surgery at later stages

Lungs: inefficient control of expiration

Vocal folds: incomplete collision, vortices,

aperiodicity

Vocal tract: loss of muscle co-ordination

Speech signal

Extract feature vector

Feature selection

Report results

Statistical machine learning (mapping features PD)

Sustained vowel “ahh…”

What sort of speech characteristics should we be aiming to extract from the signals?

Which are the state of the art speech signal processing algorithms, and can you suggest some ways to extend/improve them?

Who are the leading researchers/research groups on the topic of mining speech signals for medical information?

Hint: background information, and check some useful references: http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/tsanas/Preprints/DPhil%20thesis.pdf