Improving the Assessment of Mild Cognitive Impairment in Advanced Age With a Novel Multi-Feature Automated Speech and Language Analysis of Verbal Fluency

Liu Chen, Meysam Asgari, Robert Gale, Katherine Wild, Hiroko Dodge, Jeffrey Kaye

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

Introduction: Clinically relevant information can go uncaptured in the conventional scoring of a verbal fluency test. We hypothesize that characterizing the temporal aspects of the response through a set of time related measures will be useful in distinguishing those with MCI from cognitively intact controls. Methods: Audio recordings of an animal fluency test administered to 70 demographically matched older adults (mean age 90.4 years), 28 with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 42 cognitively intact (CI) were professionally transcribed and fed into an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to estimate the start time of each recalled word in the response. Next, we semantically cluster participant generated animal names and through a novel set of time-based measures, we characterize the semantic search strategy of subjects in retrieving words from animal name clusters. This set of time-based features along with standard count-based features (e.g., number of correctly retrieved animal names) were then used in a machine learning algorithm trained for distinguishing those with MCI from CI controls. Results: The combination of both count-based and time-based features, automatically derived from the test response, achieved 77% on AUC-ROC of the support vector machine (SVM) classifier, outperforming the model trained only on the raw test score (AUC, 65%), and well above the chance model (AUC, 50%). Conclusion: This approach supports the value of introducing time-based measures to the assessment of verbal fluency in the context of this generative task differentiating subjects with MCI from those with intact cognition.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number535
JournalFrontiers in Psychology
Volume11
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 9 2020

Keywords

  • animal fluency
  • biomarkers
  • computerized assessment
  • mild cognitive impairment (MCI)
  • neuropsychological tests
  • short term memory

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Psychology

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Improving the Assessment of Mild Cognitive Impairment in Advanced Age With a Novel Multi-Feature Automated Speech and Language Analysis of Verbal Fluency'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this