The Triple Tone Sonification Method to Enhance the Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Dementia

For the current diagnosis of Alzheimer’s dementia (AD), physicians and neuroscientists primarily call upon visual and statistical analysis methods of large, multi-dimensional positron emission tomography (PET) brain scan data sets. As these data sets are complex in nature, the assessment of disease severity proves challenging, and is susceptible to cognitive and perceptual errors causing intra and inter-reader variability among doctors. The Triple-Tone Sonification method, first presented and evaluated by Roginska et al., invites an audible element to the diagnosis process, offering doctors another tool to gain certainly and clarification of disease stages. Audible beating patterns resulting from three interacting frequencies extracted from PET brain scan data, the Triple-Tone method underwent a second round of subjective listening test and evaluation, this time on radiologists from NYU Langone Medical Center. Results show the method is effective at evaluation PET scan brain data.