Classification of Parkinson's disease Using Pitch Synchronous Speech Analysis.

Human speech production is a complex task that demands synchronized cognitive and muscular functioning. Assessment of a Parkinson's disease (PD) patient's speech using computational methods is a growing field of research. Existing methodologies aim at extraction and usage of features from speech to capture perturbations due to PD. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for feature extraction and analysis. Features are extracted from each pitch cycle of the speech and variances of the features are used for analysis making this a pitch synchronous methodology. Dimensionality problem is addressed by feature selection, which is followed by an unsupervised k-means clustering to perform classification. A dataset containing 40 participants, 22 (7 female and 15 male) PD and 18 (12 female and 6 male) healthy controls (HC) is used for evaluation. The promising results yielded from this study provides support for our hypothesis that pitch synchronous speech analysis can be useful in PD analysis.