garcia17@interspeech_2017@ISCA

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#1 Evaluation of the Neurological State of People with Parkinson’s Disease Using i-Vectors [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi1]

Authors: N. Garcia ; Juan Rafael Orozco-Arroyave ; L.F. D’Haro ; Najim Dehak ; Elmar Nöth

The i-vector approach is used to model the speech of PD patients with the aim of assessing their condition. Features related to the articulation, phonation, and prosody dimensions of speech were used to train different i-vector extractors. Each i-vector extractor is trained using utterances from both PD patients and healthy controls. The i-vectors of the healthy control (HC) speakers are averaged to form a single i-vector that represents the HC group, i.e., the reference i-vector. A similar process is done to create a reference of the group with PD patients. Then the i-vectors of test speakers are compared to these reference i-vectors using the cosine distance. Three analyses are performed using this distance: classification between PD patients and HC, prediction of the neurological state of PD patients according to the MDS-UPDRS-III scale, and prediction of a modified version of the Frenchay Dysarthria Assessment. The Spearman’s correlation between this cosine distance and the MDS-UPDRS-III scale was 0.63. These results show the suitability of this approach to monitor the neurological state of people with Parkinson’s Disease.