Assessing clinical utility of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence approaches to analyze speech recordings in Multiple Sclerosis: A Pilot Study

Background: An early diagnosis together with an accurate disease progression monitoring of multiple sclerosis is an important component of successful disease management. Prior studies have established that multiple sclerosis is correlated with speech discrepancies. Early research using objective acoustic measurements has discovered measurable dysarthria. Objective: To determine the potential clinical utility of machine learning and deep learning/AI approaches for the aiding of diagnosis, biomarker extraction and progression monitoring of multiple sclerosis using speech recordings. Methods: A corpus of 65 MS-positive and 66 healthy individuals reading the same text aloud was used for targeted acoustic feature extraction utilizing automatic phoneme segmentation. A series of binary classification models was trained, tuned, and evaluated regarding their Accuracy and area-under-curve. Results: The Random Forest model performed best, achieving an Accuracy of 0.82 on the validation dataset and an area-under-curve of 0.76 across 5 k-fold cycles on the training dataset. 5 out of 7 acoustic features were statistically significant. Conclusion: Machine learning and artificial intelligence in automatic analyses of voice recordings for aiding MS diagnosis and progression tracking seems promising. Further clinical validation of these methods and their mapping onto multiple sclerosis progression is needed, as well as a validating utility for English-speaking populations.