This diploma thesis focuses on the automated diagnosis of hypokinetic dysarthria in the multilingual speech corpus, which is a motor speech disorder that occurs in patients with neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. The automatic speech recognition approach to diagnosis is based on the acoustic analysis of speech and subsequent use of mathematical models. The popularity of this method is on the rise due to its objectivity and the possibility of working simultaneously on different languages. The aim of this work is to find out which acoustic parameters have high discriminative power and are universal for multiple languages. To achieve this, a statistical analysis of parameterized speech tasks and subsequent modelling by machine learning methods was used. The analyses were performed for Czech, American English, Hungarian and all languages together. It was found that only some parameters enable the diagnosis of the hypokinetic disorder and are, at the same time, universal for multiple languages. The relF2SD parameter shows the best results, followed by the NST parameter. When classifying speakers of all the languages together, the model achieves accuracy of 59 % and sensitivity of 72 %.

This master´s thesis deals with the calculation of parameters that would be able to differentiate healthy speech and speech impaired by hypokinetic dysarthria. There was staged hypokinetic dysarthria, which is a motoric disorder of speech and vocal tract. Were studied speech signal processing methods. Further parameters were studied, which could well differentiate healthy and diseased speech. Subsequently, these parameters were programmed in Python programming language. The next step was to create a web application in Django framework, which is used for the analysis of the dyzartic speech.

The diploma thesis is focused on the issue of acquired dysarthric and swallowing disorders in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and on multidisciplinary care provided to patients with this disease. Theoretical part of the thesis is divided into three chapters. The introductory chapter presents a summary of current knowledge about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The following two chapters are dedicated to dysarthria and dysphagia and their specifics in ALS. The practical part of the diploma thesis is represented by the fourth chapter which incorporates a research survey focused on multidisciplinary care provided to patients with ALS. The primary aim of the research is to evaluate the multidisciplinary care provided to two selected patients with ALS with a focus on speech and swallowing disorders. The secondary objectives of the research relate to the evaluation of the extent of acquired dysarthric and swallowing disorders of these patients, providing a comprehensive overview of the course and content of the provided care and gathering information to create information brochure for patients with ALS and caregivers. The research approach to achieve the determined objectives of the research survey is creation of case studies using qualitative methods of data collection, which is a structured interview...

This work deals with a design of hypokinetic dysarthria analysis system. Hypokinetic dysarthria is a speech motor dysfunction that is present in approx. 90 % of patients with Parkinson’s disease. Next there is described Parkinson's disease and change of the speech signal by this disability. The following describes the symptoms, which are used for the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease (FCR, VSA, VAI, etc.). The work is mainly focused on parameterization techniques that can be used to diagnose or monitor this disease as well as estimate its progress. A protocol of dysarthric speech acquisition is described in this work too. In combination with acoustic analysis it can be used to estimate a grade of hypokinetic dysarthria in fields of faciokinesis, phonorespiration and phonetics (correlation with 3F test). Regarding the parameterization, new features based on method RASTA. The analysis is based on parametrization sentences complicated for articulation. Experimental dataset consists of 101 PD patients with different disease progress and 53 healthy controls. For classification with feature selection have selected method mRMR.

The diploma thesis deals with the non-invasive analysis of progression of Parkinson´s disease using the acoustic analysis of speach. Hypokinetic dysarthria in connection with Parkinson´s disease as well as speech parameters are described in this work. Speech parameters are sorted according to the speech component they affect. The work uses the phonation of vowels "a" speech task as the most commonly used speech task in the field of pathological speech processing, because of its resistance to demographic and linguistic characteristics of the speakers. Based on obtained knowledge, in MATLAB development enviroment were created systém for UPDRS III scale estimation. The UPDRS III scale is based on subjective diagnosis given by the doctor. At first, one individual parameter is used for the UPDRS III scale value estimation. Then the feature selection using SFFS algorithm is applied to gain feature combination with minimal estimation errror. Attention i salso paid to correlation between individual symptoms and UPDSR III scale.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the globus pallidus internus (GPi) is an effective symptomatic treatment for pharmacoresistant dystonic syndromes. The relationship between grey matter volume and intracortical inhibition of the primary motor cortex (MI) in regard to the effectiveness and the state (ON/OFF) of GPi DBS was analysed in the first study. The grey matter of chronically treated patients showed hypertrophy of the supplementary motor area and cerebellar vermis whereas this difference was more significant in patients with a better clinical outcome. The grey matter of the cerebellar hemispheres of the patients showed positive correlation with the improvement of an intracortical inhibition which was generally less effective in patients regardless of the GPi DBS state. Moreover, we showed the same level of SICI in the good responders as in the healthy controls, while in non-responders was the SICI decreased. In the second study, by using paired associative stimulation (PAS) we studied the influence of primary somatosensory cortex (SI) on the MI excitability in dystonia in regards to the effectiveness of GPi DBS. SI PAS decreased the MI excitability in the GPi DBS ON state while switching the stimulation off decreased an inhibitory effect of SI on MI excitability. Non-responders showed a...

Hypokinetická dysartrie (HD) je častým symptomem vyskytujícím se až u 90% pacientů trpících idiopatickou Parkinsonovou nemocí (PN), která výrazně přispívá k nepřirozenosti a nesrozumitelnosti řeči těchto pacientů. Hlavním cílem této disertační práce je prozkoumat možnosti použití kvantitativní paraklinické analýzy HD, s použitím parametrizace řeči, statistického zpracování a strojového učení, za účelem diagnózy a objektivního hodnocení PN. Tato práce dokazuje, že počítačová akustická analýza je schopná dostatečně popsat HD, speciálně tzv. dysprozodii, která se projevuje nedokonalou intonací a nepřirozeným tempem řeči. Navíc také dokazuje, že použití klinicky interpretovatelných akustických parametrů kvantifikujících různé aspekty HD, jako jsou fonace, artikulace a prozodie, může být použito k objektivnímu posouzení závažnosti motorických a nemotorických symptomů vyskytujících se u pacientů s PN. Dále tato práce prezentuje výzkum společných patofyziologických mechanizmů stojících za HD a zárazy v chůzi při PN. Nakonec tato práce dokazuje, že akustická analýza HD může být použita pro odhad progrese zárazů v chůzi v horizontu dvou let.

Test 3F is used to diagnose the extent of motor speech disorder – dysarthria for czech speakers. The evaluation of dysarthric speech is distorted by subjective assessment. The motivation behind this thesis is that there are not many automatic and objective analysis tools that can be used to evaluate phonation, articulation, prosody and respiration of speech disorder. The aim of this diploma thesis is to identify, implement and test acoustic features of speech that could be used to objectify and automate the evaluation. These features should be easily interpretable by the clinician. It is assumed that the evaluation could be more precise because of the detailed analysis that acoustic features provide. The performance of these features was tested on database of 151 czech speakers that consists of 51 healthy speakers and 100 patients. Statistical analysis and methods of machine learning were used to identify the correlation between features and subjective assesment. 27 of total 30 speech tasks of Test 3F were identified as suitable for automatic evaluation. Within the scope of this thesis only 10 tasks of Test 3F were tested because only a limited part of the database could be preprocessed. The result of statistical analysis is 14 features that were most useful for the test evaluation. The most significant features are: MET (respiration), relF0SD (intonation), relSEOVR (voice intensity – prosody). The lowest prediction error of the machine learning regression models was 7.14 %. The conclusion is that the evaluation of most of the tasks of Test 3F can be automated. The results of analysis of 10 tasks shows that the most significant factor in dysarthria evaluation is limited expiration, monotone voice and low variabilty of speech intensity.

This work deals with a design of hypokinetic dysarthria analysis system. Hypokinetic dysarthria is a speech motor dysfunction that is present in approx. 90 % of patients with Parkinson’s disease. The work is mainly focused on parameterization techniques that can be used to diagnose or monitor this disease as well as estimate its progress. Next, features that significantly correlate with subjective tests are found. These features can be used to estimate scores of different scales like Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) or Mini–Mental State Examination (MMSE). A protocol of dysarthric speech acquisition is introduced in this work too. In combination with acoustic analysis it can be used to estimate a grade of hypokinetic dysarthria in fields of faciokinesis, phonorespiration and phonetics (correlation with 3F test). Regarding the parameterization, features based on modulation spectrum, inferior colliculus coefficients, bicepstrum, approximate and sample entropy, empirical mode decomposition and singular points are originally introduced in this work. All the designed techniques are integrated into the system concept in way that it can be implemented in a hospital and used for a research on Parkinson’s disease or its evaluation.

This thesis deals with speech analysis of people who suffer from Parkinson’s disease. Purpose of this thesis is to obtain statistical sample of speech parameters which helps to determine if examined person is suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Statistical sample is based on hypokinetic dysarthria detection. For speech signal pre-processing DC-offset removal and pre-emphasis are used. The next step is to divide signal into frames. Phonation parameters, MFCC and PLP coefficients are used for characterization of framed speech signal. After parametrization the speech signal can be analyzed by statistical methods. For statistical analysis in this thesis Spearman’s and Pearson’s correlation coefficients, mutual information, Mann-Whitney U test and Student’s t-test are used. The thesis results are the groups of speech parameters for individual long czech vowels which are the best indicator of the difference between healthy person and patient suffering from Parkinson’s disease. These result can be helpful in medical diagnosis of a patient.