Deep Learning Approach to Parkinson’s Disease Detection Using Voice Recordings and Convolutional Neural Network Dedicated to Image Classification

This study presents an approach to Parkinson’s disease detection using vowels with sustained phonation and a ResNet architecture dedicated originally to image classification. We calculated spectrum of the audio recordings and used them as an image input to the ResNet architecture pre-trained using the ImageNet and SVD databases. To prevent overfitting the dataset was strongly augmented in the time domain. The Parkinson’s dataset (from PC-GITA database) consists of 100 patients (50 were healthy / 50 were diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease). Each patient was recorded 3 times. The obtained accuracy on the validation set is above 90% which is comparable to the current state-of-the-art methods. The results are promising because it turned out that features learned on natural images are able to transfer the knowledge to artificial images representing the spectrogram of the voice signal. What is more, we showed that it is possible to perform a successful detection of Parkinson’s disease using only frequency-based features. A spectrogram enables visual representation of frequencies spectrum of a signal. It allows to follow the frequencies changes of a signal in time.