Convolutional Neural Networks and a Transfer Learning Strategy to Classify Parkinson's Disease from Speech in Three Different Languages

Parkinson’s disease patients develop different speech impairments that affect their communication capabilities. The automatic assessment of the speech of the patients allows the development of computer aided tools to support the diagnosis and the evaluation of the disease severity. This paper introduces a methodology to classify Parkinson’s disease from speech in three different languages: Spanish, German, and Czech. The proposed approach considers convolutional neural networks trained with time frequency representations and a transfer learning strategy among the three languages. The transfer learning scheme aims to improve the accuracy of the models when the weights of the neural network are initialized with utterances from a different language than the used for the test set. The results suggest that the proposed strategy improves the accuracy of the models in up to 8% when the base model used to initialize the weights of the classifier is robust enough. In addition, the results obtained after the transfer learning are in most cases more balanced in terms of specificity-sensitivity than those trained without the transfer learning strategy.