arXiv subjects

Fatemeh Geranmayeh

Publications and source records attributed to Fatemeh Geranmayeh.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Evaluating Spoken Language as a Biomarker for Automated Screening of Cognitive Impairment

Timely and accurate assessment of cognitive impairment remains a major unmet need. Speech biomarkers offer a scalable, non-invasive, cost-effective solution for automated screening. However, the clinical utility of machine learning (ML) remains limited by interpretability and generalisability to real-world speech datasets. We evaluate explainable ML for screening of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) and severity prediction using benchmark DementiaBank speech (N = 291, 64% female, 69.8 (SD = 8.6) years). We validate generalisability on pilot data collected in-residence (N = 22, 59% female, 76.2 (SD = 8.0) years). To enhance clinical utility, we stratify risk for actionable triage and assess linguistic feature importance. We show that a Random Forest trained on linguistic features for ADRD detection achieves a mean sensitivity of 69.4% (95% confidence interval (CI) = 66.4-72.5) and specificity of 83.3% (78.0-88.7). On pilot data, this model yields a mean sensitivity of 70.0% (58.0-82.0) and specificity of 52.5% (39.3-65.7). For prediction of Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores, a Random Forest Regressor achieves a mean absolute MMSE error of 3.7 (3.7-3.8), with comparable performance of 3.3 (3.1-3.5) on pilot data. Risk stratification improves specificity by 13% on the test set, offering a pathway for clinical triage. Linguistic features associated with ADRD include increased use of pronouns and adverbs, greater disfluency, reduced analytical thinking, lower lexical diversity, and fewer words that reflect a psychological state of completion. Our predictive modelling shows promise for integration with conversational technology at home to monitor cognitive health and triage higher-risk individuals, enabling early screening and intervention.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Application of Whisper in Clinical Practice: the Post-Stroke Speech Assessment during a Naming Task

Detailed assessment of language impairment following stroke remains a cognitively complex and clinician-intensive task, limiting timely and scalable diagnosis. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) foundation models offer a promising pathway to augment human evaluation through intelligent systems, but their effectiveness in the context of speech and language impairment remains uncertain. In this study, we evaluate whether Whisper, a state-of-the-art ASR foundation model, can be applied to transcribe and analyze speech from patients with stroke during a commonly used picture-naming task. We assess both verbatim transcription accuracy and the model's ability to support downstream prediction of language function, which has major implications for outcomes after stroke. Our results show that the baseline Whisper model performs poorly on single-word speech utterances. Nevertheless, fine-tuning Whisper significantly improves transcription accuracy (reducing Word Error Rate by 87.72% in healthy speech and 71.22% in speech from patients). Further, learned representations from the model enable accurate prediction of speech quality (average F1 Macro of 0.74 for healthy, 0.75 for patients). However, evaluations on an unseen (TORGO) dataset reveal limited generalizability, highlighting the inability of Whisper to perform zero-shot transcription of single-word utterances on out-of-domain clinical speech and emphasizing the need to adapt models to specific clinical populations. While challenges remain in cross-domain generalization, these findings highlight the potential of foundation models, when appropriately fine-tuned, to advance automated speech and language assessment and rehabilitation for stroke-related impairments.

cs.SD↗