Parkinson's Disease Diagnosis Using Machine Learning and Voice

Biomarkers derived from human voice can offer insight into neurological disorders, such as Parkinson's disease (PD), because of their underlying cognitive and neuromuscular function. PD is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects about one million people in the the United States, with approximately sixty thousand new clinical diagnoses made each year[1]. Historically, PD has been difficult to quantify and doctors have tended to focus on some symptoms while ignoring others, relying primarily on subjective rating scales [2]. Due to the decrease in motor control that is the hallmark of the disease, voice can be used as a means to detect and diagnose PD. With advancements in technology and the prevalence of audio collecting devices in daily lives, reliable models that can translate this audio data into a diagnostic tool for healthcare professionals would potentially provide diagnoses that are cheaper and more accurate. We provide evidence to validate this concept here using a voice dataset collected from people with and without PD. This paper explores the effectiveness of using supervised classification algorithms, such as deep neural networks, to accurately diagnose individuals with the disease. Our peak accuracy of 85% provided by the machine learning models exceed the average clinical diagnosis accuracy of non-experts (73.8%) and average accuracy of movement disorder specialists (79.6% without follow-up, 83.9% after follow-up) with pathological post-mortem examination as ground truth[3].