Mobidev Applies AI for Dementia Diagnosis

About 23% of dementia causes are believed to be reversible when diagnosed early. See how MobiDev applies AI for dementia diagnosis by looking into symptoms such as communicative and reasoning problems. These are some of the earliest indicators used to identify patients at risk of developing dementia. Applying AI for audio and speech processing significantly improves the diagnostic opportunity for dementia and helps to spot early signs years before significant symptoms develop. MobiDev AI engineers share their experience creating a speech processing model that predicts dementia risk.

The goal of this experiment was to detect as many sick people as possible out of the available data. The method used for dementia detection applies neural networks both for feature extraction and classification. Since audio data has a complex and continuous nature with multiple sonic layers, neural networks appear superior to traditional machine learning for feature extraction. In this research 2 types of models were used: 

• Speech-representation neural network which accounts for extracting speech features (embeddings), and 
• Classification model which learns patterns from feature-extractor output

In terms of data, recordings of Cookie Theft neuropsychological examination are used to train the model.

Given the two different approaches to dementia classification with AI, we can derive a couple of recommendations to improve the model output:

1. Use more data
2. Improve preprocessing procedure
3. Alter models

As the test results show, applying neural networks to analyzing dementia audio recordings can generate accurate suggestions. Training neural networks for speech classification tasks is a complex exercise that requires data science expertise as well as audio processing knowledge.

For the explicit description of how MobiDev applies AI for dementia diagnosis as well as what models and methods for fine-tuning were used, you can download the PDF of this article following the link at:
https://mobidev.biz/blog/using-artificial-intelligence-early-dementia-diagnosis-prediction

MobiDev is an international software engineering company with offices in Poland and Ukraine.The company is focused on helping visionaries create their products. MobiDev invests into technology research and has years of experience building AI-powered solutions, implementing machine learning, augmented reality, and IoT.