Journal of Alzheimers Disease & Parkinsonism
Open Access

Research Article

Diagnosis and Tracking of Parkinson's Disease by using Automatically Extracted Acoustic Features

CJ Pérez^1*, Y Campos-Roca², L Naranjo³ and J Martín¹

¹Departamento de Matemáticas, Universidad de Extremadura, Cáceres (Spain)

²Departamento de Tecnologías de los Computadores y de las Comunicaciones, Universidad de Extremadura, Cáceres (Spain)

³Departamento de Matemáticas, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, México DF (Mexico)

*Corresponding Author:

Carlos Javier Pérez Sánchez
Departamento de Matemáticas Universidad de Extremadura, Cáceres (Spain)
Tel: +34927257146
E-mail: carper@unex.es

Received Date: July 07, 2016; Accepted Date: September 07, 2016; Published Date: September 14,2016

Citation: Pérez CJ, Campos-Roca Y, Naranjo L, Martín J (2016) Diagnosis and Tracking of Parkinson’s Disease by using Automatically Extracted Acoustic Features. J Alzheimers Dis Parkinsonism 6:260. doi: 10.4172/2161-0460.1000260

Copyright: © 2016 Pérez CJ, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

A system that is capable of automatically discriminating healthy people from people with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) from speech recordings is proposed. It is initially based on 27 features, extracted from recordings of sustained vowels. The number of characteristics has been further reduced by feature selection. The system has been tested by using a heterogeneous database, composed of 40 control subjects and 40 subjects with PD belonging to different severity stages of the disease and under prescribed treatment. Repeated measures per individual were averaged before being assigned to subject, avoiding the usual practice of considering measurements within the same subject as independent. The best overall accuracy obtained was 85.25%, with a sensitivity of 90.23% and a specificity of 80.28%. Additionally, a pilot experiment to track PD severity stages has been performed on 32 out of the 40 initial subjects with PD. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first speech-based experiment on automatic PD tracking by using the Hoehn and Yahr’s scale (clinical metric mainly focused on postural instability). The results suggest that progression of voice impairment follows different developmental trajectories than postural instability, implying different degenerative mechanisms.

Keywords