7 ms·

Say 'Ahhh': A Simpler Way To Detect Parkinson's

91 points by gruseom 14y ago

laktek 14y ago
Wonder whether it's possible for them to crowdsource this via web instead of the phone lines, which would make it easier for more people to participate.
- timClicks 14y ago
  Possibly just use something like Twillo or Skype to make this global, simple and cheap/free?
- rada 14y ago
  Average onset of Parkinson's happens at 60 years old.
  - prbuckley 14y ago
    That is given the poor tools we have to date to diagnose the disease. I think the really promising thing about this development is the possibility of earlier warning and being able to test new treatments before the disease progress's so far that someone is going in to ask the doctor what is wrong. My father has Parkinson's, it is an awful disease.
justinph 14y ago
The NPR story has a non-obvious link to the site. Here it is: http://www.parkinsonsvoice.org/ http://www.parkinsonsvoice.org/ That's pretty amazing if they can detect it within the poor 8khz of a phone. I wonder how awful cell phone reception changes the accuracy.
- chime 14y ago
  I've never had poor cell phone reception change the frequency of the sound, only silence, choppiness, or complete garbage being inserted - all of which should be detectable via typical DSP algos.
- tspiteri 14y ago
  While 8 kHz is low if you look at the carrier of the speech signal, which is something like the pitch of the speech, it is pretty high compared to the envelope frequency of the speech signal. You do not move your jaw, tounge and lips at anywhere near 8000 times per second. The algorithm looks at things like how the jaw, tounge and lips move during speech, and I guess 8 kHz is quite enough for those.
azza-bazoo 14y ago
I wonder what the false-negative rate of this algorithm is. 99% (which I assume is the true-positive rate) is certainly impressive for such a simple test, though. It would be all kinds of awesome if this turns into something that can be done reliably and routinely! Edit: seems like 99% is only for later stages of Parkinson's, and the accuracy number is just off a 50-person sample. Less impressive, but still cool. http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2012/07/03/new-software-can-diagnose-parkinsons-disease-simply-by-listening-to-your-voice/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2012/07/03/new-softw...
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  How do you get 99% accuracy for a 50 person sample? Has to be 100% or 98% surely?
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
Interesting that I got cut off during the "Ahh" test and asked to redo it. I'm sure I don't have exceptional lung capacity.
- Urgo 14y ago
  I did too the first time. Maybe that was on purpose.
blahedo 14y ago
One big issue with gathering this kind of data over the phone is the frequency cutoff on voice-only lines—above a certain frequency (I want to say 4kHz? maybe I'm misremembering), the information is lost. It's basically as if you took a Fourier transform, zeroed out everything above the threshold, and then transformed back.[0] For humans (and even computers) trying to interpret the sound as language, that's not a huge problem, although you might lose some of the higher formants. But for an acoustic analysis that's trying to do voiceprinting—in this case to detect Parkinson's—this could be a big problem. (I'm also irritated by the glib "99 percent success rate" but I just ranted about that on a different HN post so I won't go into it here.) [0] Why do this? So the phone company can compress and send a lot more data over the same amount of internal bandwidth. Come to think of it, it's kind of related to how wavelet-based compression works.
- rachelbythebay 14y ago
  8 bits, 8 kHz. There's only so much you can do with that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DS0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DS0 Sure, we can do more now, but this isn't exactly new. Consider the age in which it was conceived and it may seem more reasonable.
- NinetyNine 14y ago
  The sampling frequency doesn't directly effect the audio frequencies it can encode. Telephones do PCM encoding (meaning it has data representing the graph of the sound wave) at 8 kh/z. Following the nyquist sampling theorem (cut your rate by 2), this can allow frequencies up to 4 kh/z (as you said). It's not a hard cutoff though, you can still get most of the sounds above that pitch, they'll just sound pretty weird (as if you were talking on the telephone!)
  - lgeek 14y ago
    No, components above the Nyquist frequency are filtered out before the ADC because you'd otherwise get aliasing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliasing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliasing
- ableal 14y ago
cteng04 14y ago
would be cool to see somebody build a twilio app to link on the article and collect voice samples right off the page
rouli 14y ago
It's a very interesting field. Can insurance companies detect the early stages of Parkinson's when you call their call-centers and change your rates accordingly? Here's a related dissertation on detecting mental health condition by using voice recordings http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2012/EECS-2012-55.pdf http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2012/EECS-2012-55... (haven't read it yet, but was meaning to for quite a while)
nathan87 14y ago
shameless plug of some ideas i've had about parkinson's disease; i'd be interested to hear what others think about my reasoning: Michael J Fox's Parkinson's Disease may have been caused by amphetamine use and/or sleep deprivation http://www.nathanwailes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=228 http://www.nathanwailes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=22... Sleep Deprivation May Be a Common Cause of Parkinson's Dis. http://www.nathanwailes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=248 http://www.nathanwailes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=24...
- apl 14y ago
  Yeah, no offense, but all you've written is either widely known (Amphetamine-induced DA depletion inducing Parkinson's-like motor symptoms and so on), based on misunderstandings (some of your graph readings are horrifically beside the point), or simply wrong. Grab a book on neuropharmacology, or even just a neuroscience intro ("Fundamental Neuroscience" by Squire and colleagues is a good one), and accept that armchair-bullshitting is not how progress is made.
  - nathan87 14y ago
    Hey apl, thanks for considering my ideas! I hope you won't mind if i try to defend them against your objections: re: "it's widely known that amph. can induce Parkinson's-like motor symptoms" This may be widely known among neuroscientists, but it's certainly not widely known among the general public, which is my audience for the essay. re: "some of your graph readings are horrifically beside the point" There's really only one graph I read from, so I'm going to assume you're talking about the "Loss of DA Neurons After Heavy Meth Use". Why, exactly, reading that graph beside the point? The study I cite immediately prior to that graph (from a Michael J Fox source, no less) states my point for me: using amphetamines can lead to fewer dopamine neurons. re: "some of what you've written is simply wrong" Please be more specific! I want to know what you found wrong. re: "grab a book on neuropharmacology" I was actually a psychology major in college and took several classes on neuroscience and neuropharmacology, so I'm not totally new to this field. re: "armchair bullshitting is not how progress is made" This wasn't armchair bullshitting; I was combining the results of several different published studies and other concrete information to arrive at a novel hypothesis. I agree my reasoning isn't enough to remove a great deal of uncertainty about whether the hypothesis is true, but all I'm trying to do is establish that it's plausible enough to warrant people's attention. Many scientific advances are made this way; for example, in physics there are often speculative theories made that need to be verified through experiment: Einstein's theories and the idea of a Higgs Boson, the idea of dark matter and dark energy. All of them started off as unproven possible explanations of observed phenomena, and all needed to be verified. But that doesn't mean they weren't worth giving attention before they were verified.
martingoodson 14y ago
The paper from the same group last year on the topic is here: http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/8/59/842.full#sec-9 http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/8/59/842.full... They are using random forest out-of-sample error as a metric but doing feature selection before this step (see table 6). As far as I can make out from a quick reading they are essentially making the error described here: http://www-stat.stanford.edu/%7Etibs/sta306b/cvwrong.pdf http://www-stat.stanford.edu/%7Etibs/sta306b/cvwrong.pdf and elegantly described in this recent blog post: http://blog.kaggle.com/2012/07/06/the-dangers-of-overfitting-psychopathy-post-mortem/ http://blog.kaggle.com/2012/07/06/the-dangers-of-overfitting... On a sample size of only 42 people, overfitting seems very likely.
Jim_Neath 14y ago
If this works successfully then it would be great but as a 28 year old with Parkinson's, I'm skeptical. It took approximately 12 months, numerous blood tests, MRIs and doctor visits to diagnose me as having YOPD, so I'm finding it hard to believe that this could be replaced with a telephone call.
- DigitalJack 14y ago
  If you don't mind answering, what was your path to the Parkinson's diagnosis? I mean, what were some of the first signs that something was wrong?
  - Jim_Neath 14y ago
    I developed a slight tremor in my right hand and had trouble moving my arm as fluidly as my other.
copyrightip 14y ago
This will come as no surprise to the orthodontists in the UK and US who treat some cases of Parkinson's as a disorder of the mandible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYKBPd2Kowo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYKBPd2Kowo

91 points by gruseom 14y ago

Wonder whether it's possible for them to crowdsource this via web instead of the phone lines, which would make it easier for more people to participate.

timClicks 14y ago
Possibly just use something like Twillo or Skype to make this global, simple and cheap/free?
rada 14y ago
Average onset of Parkinson's happens at 60 years old.
- prbuckley 14y ago
  That is given the poor tools we have to date to diagnose the disease. I think the really promising thing about this development is the possibility of earlier warning and being able to test new treatments before the disease progress's so far that someone is going in to ask the doctor what is wrong. My father has Parkinson's, it is an awful disease.

justinph 14y ago

The NPR story has a non-obvious link to the site. Here it is: http://www.parkinsonsvoice.org/ http://www.parkinsonsvoice.org/ That's pretty amazing if they can detect it within the poor 8khz of a phone. I wonder how awful cell phone reception changes the accuracy.

chime 14y ago
I've never had poor cell phone reception change the frequency of the sound, only silence, choppiness, or complete garbage being inserted - all of which should be detectable via typical DSP algos.
tspiteri 14y ago
While 8 kHz is low if you look at the carrier of the speech signal, which is something like the pitch of the speech, it is pretty high compared to the envelope frequency of the speech signal. You do not move your jaw, tounge and lips at anywhere near 8000 times per second. The algorithm looks at things like how the jaw, tounge and lips move during speech, and I guess 8 kHz is quite enough for those.

azza-bazoo 14y ago

I wonder what the false-negative rate of this algorithm is. 99% (which I assume is the true-positive rate) is certainly impressive for such a simple test, though. It would be all kinds of awesome if this turns into something that can be done reliably and routinely! Edit: seems like 99% is only for later stages of Parkinson's, and the accuracy number is just off a 50-person sample. Less impressive, but still cool. http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2012/07/03/new-software-can-diagnose-parkinsons-disease-simply-by-listening-to-your-voice/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2012/07/03/new-softw...

pbhjpbhj 14y ago
How do you get 99% accuracy for a 50 person sample? Has to be 100% or 98% surely?

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

Interesting that I got cut off during the "Ahh" test and asked to redo it. I'm sure I don't have exceptional lung capacity.

Urgo 14y ago
I did too the first time. Maybe that was on purpose.

blahedo 14y ago

One big issue with gathering this kind of data over the phone is the frequency cutoff on voice-only lines—above a certain frequency (I want to say 4kHz? maybe I'm misremembering), the information is lost. It's basically as if you took a Fourier transform, zeroed out everything above the threshold, and then transformed back.[0] For humans (and even computers) trying to interpret the sound as language, that's not a huge problem, although you might lose some of the higher formants. But for an acoustic analysis that's trying to do voiceprinting—in this case to detect Parkinson's—this could be a big problem. (I'm also irritated by the glib "99 percent success rate" but I just ranted about that on a different HN post so I won't go into it here.) [0] Why do this? So the phone company can compress and send a lot more data over the same amount of internal bandwidth. Come to think of it, it's kind of related to how wavelet-based compression works.

rachelbythebay 14y ago
8 bits, 8 kHz. There's only so much you can do with that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DS0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DS0 Sure, we can do more now, but this isn't exactly new. Consider the age in which it was conceived and it may seem more reasonable.
NinetyNine 14y ago
The sampling frequency doesn't directly effect the audio frequencies it can encode. Telephones do PCM encoding (meaning it has data representing the graph of the sound wave) at 8 kh/z. Following the nyquist sampling theorem (cut your rate by 2), this can allow frequencies up to 4 kh/z (as you said). It's not a hard cutoff though, you can still get most of the sounds above that pitch, they'll just sound pretty weird (as if you were talking on the telephone!)
- lgeek 14y ago
  No, components above the Nyquist frequency are filtered out before the ADC because you'd otherwise get aliasing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliasing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliasing
ableal 14y ago

cteng04 14y ago

would be cool to see somebody build a twilio app to link on the article and collect voice samples right off the page

rouli 14y ago

It's a very interesting field. Can insurance companies detect the early stages of Parkinson's when you call their call-centers and change your rates accordingly? Here's a related dissertation on detecting mental health condition by using voice recordings http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2012/EECS-2012-55.pdf http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2012/EECS-2012-55... (haven't read it yet, but was meaning to for quite a while)

nathan87 14y ago

shameless plug of some ideas i've had about parkinson's disease; i'd be interested to hear what others think about my reasoning: Michael J Fox's Parkinson's Disease may have been caused by amphetamine use and/or sleep deprivation http://www.nathanwailes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=228 http://www.nathanwailes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=22... Sleep Deprivation May Be a Common Cause of Parkinson's Dis. http://www.nathanwailes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=248 http://www.nathanwailes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=24...

apl 14y ago
Yeah, no offense, but all you've written is either widely known (Amphetamine-induced DA depletion inducing Parkinson's-like motor symptoms and so on), based on misunderstandings (some of your graph readings are horrifically beside the point), or simply wrong. Grab a book on neuropharmacology, or even just a neuroscience intro ("Fundamental Neuroscience" by Squire and colleagues is a good one), and accept that armchair-bullshitting is not how progress is made.
- nathan87 14y ago
  Hey apl, thanks for considering my ideas! I hope you won't mind if i try to defend them against your objections: re: "it's widely known that amph. can induce Parkinson's-like motor symptoms" This may be widely known among neuroscientists, but it's certainly not widely known among the general public, which is my audience for the essay. re: "some of your graph readings are horrifically beside the point" There's really only one graph I read from, so I'm going to assume you're talking about the "Loss of DA Neurons After Heavy Meth Use". Why, exactly, reading that graph beside the point? The study I cite immediately prior to that graph (from a Michael J Fox source, no less) states my point for me: using amphetamines can lead to fewer dopamine neurons. re: "some of what you've written is simply wrong" Please be more specific! I want to know what you found wrong. re: "grab a book on neuropharmacology" I was actually a psychology major in college and took several classes on neuroscience and neuropharmacology, so I'm not totally new to this field. re: "armchair bullshitting is not how progress is made" This wasn't armchair bullshitting; I was combining the results of several different published studies and other concrete information to arrive at a novel hypothesis. I agree my reasoning isn't enough to remove a great deal of uncertainty about whether the hypothesis is true, but all I'm trying to do is establish that it's plausible enough to warrant people's attention. Many scientific advances are made this way; for example, in physics there are often speculative theories made that need to be verified through experiment: Einstein's theories and the idea of a Higgs Boson, the idea of dark matter and dark energy. All of them started off as unproven possible explanations of observed phenomena, and all needed to be verified. But that doesn't mean they weren't worth giving attention before they were verified.

martingoodson 14y ago

The paper from the same group last year on the topic is here: http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/8/59/842.full#sec-9 http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/8/59/842.full... They are using random forest out-of-sample error as a metric but doing feature selection before this step (see table 6). As far as I can make out from a quick reading they are essentially making the error described here: http://www-stat.stanford.edu/%7Etibs/sta306b/cvwrong.pdf http://www-stat.stanford.edu/%7Etibs/sta306b/cvwrong.pdf and elegantly described in this recent blog post: http://blog.kaggle.com/2012/07/06/the-dangers-of-overfitting-psychopathy-post-mortem/ http://blog.kaggle.com/2012/07/06/the-dangers-of-overfitting... On a sample size of only 42 people, overfitting seems very likely.

Jim_Neath 14y ago

If this works successfully then it would be great but as a 28 year old with Parkinson's, I'm skeptical. It took approximately 12 months, numerous blood tests, MRIs and doctor visits to diagnose me as having YOPD, so I'm finding it hard to believe that this could be replaced with a telephone call.

DigitalJack 14y ago
If you don't mind answering, what was your path to the Parkinson's diagnosis? I mean, what were some of the first signs that something was wrong?
- Jim_Neath 14y ago
  I developed a slight tremor in my right hand and had trouble moving my arm as fluidly as my other.

copyrightip 14y ago

This will come as no surprise to the orthodontists in the UK and US who treat some cases of Parkinson's as a disorder of the mandible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYKBPd2Kowo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYKBPd2Kowo