Automated detection of mild cognitive impairment and dementia from voice recordings: A natural language processing approach

Introduction: Automated computational assessment of neuropsychological tests would enable widespread, cost-effective screening for dementia.

Methods: A novel natural language processing approach is developed and validated to identify different stages of dementia based on automated transcription of digital voice recordings of subjects' neuropsychological tests conducted by the Framingham Heart Study (n = 1084). Transcribed sentences from the test were encoded into quantitative data and several models were trained and tested using these data and the participants' demographic characteristics.

Results: Average area under the curve (AUC) on the held-out test data reached 92.6%, 88.0%, and 74.4% for differentiating Normal cognition from Dementia, Normal or Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) from Dementia, and Normal from MCI, respectively.

Discussion: The proposed approach offers a fully automated identification of MCI and dementia based on a recorded neuropsychological test, providing an opportunity to develop a remote screening tool that could be adapted easily to any language.