Automated detection of mild cognitive impairment and dementia from voice recordings: A natural language processing approach
Open accessAbstract
Introduction: Automated computational assessment of neuropsychological tests would enable widespread, cost‐effective screening for dementia. Methods: A novel natural language processing approach is developed and validated to identify different stages of dementia based on automated transcription of digital voice recordings of subjects’ neuropsychological tests conducted by the Framingham Heart Study (n = 1084). Transcribed sentences from the test were encoded into quantitative data and several models were trained and tested using these data and the participants’ demographic characteristics. Results: Average area under the curve (AUC) on the held‐out test data reached 92.6%, 88.0%, and 74.4% for differentiating Normal cognition from Dementia, Normal or Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) from Dementia, and Normal from MCI, respectively. Discussion: The proposed approach offers a fully automated identification of MCI and dementia based on a recorded neuropsychological test, providing an opportunity to develop a remote screening tool that could be adapted easily to any language.
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Speech features have been used to automatically differentiate people with amnestic AD presentation from healthy controls.
“Indeed, speech has been studied as an objective tool for automatically differentiating people with amnestic AD presentation from healthy controls (HC).”
From Automatic classification of AD pathology in FTD phenotypes using natural speech (2024) · cites this paper as [16]
The Methods and Results (pages not provided) describe automated analysis of voice recordings that differentiated participants with dementia from those with normal cognition. Participants were classified as normal, having MCI, or having dementia; the paper does not identify the dementia group specifically as people with an amnestic AD presentation. (LLM, conf=0.87)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredThe same study distinguished individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) from HC with 71.2% accuracy.
“A more recent study used a large dataset and a natural language processing (NLP) approach to differentiate individuals with dementia from HC with 87.1% accuracy and to distinguish individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) from HC with 71.2% accuracy.”
From Automatic classification of AD pathology in FTD phenotypes using natural speech (2024) · cites this paper as [16]
The Methods identify a normal-versus-MCI classification task, so the study did distinguish MCI from healthy controls. The Results report 74.4% AUC for that task, not 71.2% classification accuracy; the passages found do not substantiate the claimed accuracy figure. (LLM, conf=0.82)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredA recent study using a natural language processing (NLP) approach differentiated individuals with dementia from HC with 87.1% accuracy.
“A more recent study used a large dataset and a natural language processing (NLP) approach to differentiate individuals with dementia from HC with 87.1% accuracy and to distinguish individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) from HC with 71.2% accuracy.”
From Automatic classification of AD pathology in FTD phenotypes using natural speech (2024) · cites this paper as [16]
The Methods describe an NLP model for distinguishing normal cognition from dementia, so the study and comparison are correctly identified. The Results report 92.6% AUC for that comparison, not 87.1% accuracy; the 87.1% figure is an AUC for a different comparison (normal cognition or MCI versus dementia). No retrieved passage establishes the cited 71.2% accuracy for MCI versus healthy controls. Page numbers were not available in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.87)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
Predicting dementia from spontaneous speech using large language models
Agbavor, F., & Liang, H. (2022) · PLOS Digital Health · doi:10.1371/journal.pdig.0000168 · Cited by 147 · see citing works
Agbavor, F., & Liang, H. (2022) · Brain Sciences · doi:10.3390/brainsci13010028 · Cited by 47 · see citing works
Automatic classification of AD pathology in FTD phenotypes using natural speech
Cho, S., Olm, C. A., Ash, S., Shellikeri, S., Agmon, G., Cousins, K. A. Q., Irwin, D. J., Grossman, M., Liberman, M., & Nevler, N. (2024) · Alzheimer's & Dementia · doi:10.1002/alz.13748 · Cited by 13 · see citing works
- Authors
- Amini, S., Hao, B., Zhang, L., Song, M., Gupta, A., Karjadi, C., Kolachalama, V. B., Au, R., & Paschalidis, I. C.
- Affiliations
- Boston University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Paschalidis, Ioannis Ch.
- ORCID
- Venue
- Alzheimer's & Dementia
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2022-07-07
- Volume
- 19
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 946-955
- ISSN
- 1552-5260 (ISSN-L)
- 1552-5279
- PMC
- PMC10148688
- OpenAlex
- W4284667718
- Cited by
- 76
- References
- 6
- Citations by year
- 2026: 16 · 2025: 27 · 2024: 19 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 3
- FWCI
- 9.94
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Licence
- Locations
- Alzheimer s & Dementia (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- OpenBU (Boston University) (submittedVersion)
- OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (DMS‐1664644, CNS‐1645681, IIS‐1914792)
- Office of Naval Research (N00014‐19‐1‐2571)
- U.S. Department of Energy (DE‐AR‐0001282, DE‐EE0009696)
- National Institutes of Health (R01 GM135930, UL54 TR004130, R01‐HL159620, R21‐CA253498)
- National Institute on Aging (AG008122, AG016495, AG033040, AG054156, AG049810, AG062109, AG068753)
- Alzheimer's Association (AARG‐NTF‐20‐643020)
- Boston University
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Psychiatry and Mental health › Dementia and Cognitive Impairment Research
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › Health Information Management › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
- Keywords
- mild cognitive impairment, dementia
- MeSH terms
- Aged, Aged, 80 and over, Dementia, Female, Humans, Male, Natural Language Processing, Neuropsychological Tests, Voice, Cognitive Dysfunction
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