Parkinson's is a
devastating disease for those living with the condition and currently there is
no cure. Diagnosis can also be
slow as there are no blood tests to detect it. But now mathematician Max Little
has come up with a non-invasive, cheap test which he hopes will offer a quick
new way to identify the disease. He will be kicking off the TEDGlobal
conference in Edinburgh calling for volunteers to contribute to a huge voice
database. Mr Little has discovered that Parkinson's symptoms can be detected by
computer algorithms that analyse voice recordings. In a blind test of voices,
the system was able to spot those with Parkinson's with an accuracy of 86%. Mr
Little was recently made a TED Fellow. The non-profit organisation behind the
TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference creates 40 such
fellowships each year. The programme aims to target innovators under the age of
40 and offers them free entry to conferences and other events.
Intel founder
Mr Little became
interested in understanding voice from a mathematical perspective while he was
studying for a PhD at Oxford University in 2003. "I was looking for a
practical application and I found it in analysing voice disorders, for example
when someone's voice has broken down from over-use or after surgery on vocal
chords," he told the BBC. "I didn't occur to me at the time that
people with Parkinson's and other movement disorders could also be detected by
the system." But a chance meeting with someone from Intel changed that. Andy
Grove, one of Intel's founders and ex-chief executive, was diagnosed with
Parkinson's in 2000 and has since pledged millions of his personal fortune to
fund research into the disease. This includes funds for the chipmaker to
develop its own projects to monitor the symptoms. "They were using devices
that detect breakdown in dexterity and accelerometers but they had also
recorded the voices of around 50 patients with Parkinson's," explained Mr
Little. The recordings were detailed as the team had recorded the patients once
a week over a six-month period. "They had an enormous amount of data but
they didn't know what to do with it. So we wondered whether my technique would
work," said Mr Little. "They set me a blind test to see if I can tell
them which ones had Parkinson's. I had 86% accuracy using the techniques I'd
developed."
The system
"learns" to detect differences in voice patterns. "This is
machine learning. We are collecting a large amount of data when we know if
someone has the disease or not and we train the database to learn how to
separate out the true symptoms of the disease from other factors." Voice
patterns can change for a number of reasons, including throat surgery, heavy
smoking and even just having a common cold. But Mr Little believes the system
will be smart enough to tell the difference. "It is not as simple as
listening for a tremor in the voice. That tremor has to be in context of other
measures and the system has to take in other factors such as if someone has a
cold." Now he is looking for volunteers to contribute to a vast voice bank
to help the database to learn even more. He is aiming to record up to 10,000
voices and has set up local numbers in 10 countries around the world. In the UK
the number is 01865 521168. Anyone can call and they need to state whether or
not they have been diagnosed with the disease. There is also a website where people can find
out more about the project. "The more people that call in, the
better," he said. "If we get 10,000 recordings we'd be very happy but
even a tenth of that would be great,"
Clinical trials
He hopes that the
technology will be available to doctors within the next two years. "We're
not intending this to be a replacement for clinical experts, rather, it can
very cheaply help identify people who might be at high risk of having the
disease and for those with the disease, it can augment treatment decisions by
providing data about how symptoms are changing in-between check-ups with the
neurologist," he said. There could also be a role for the technology in
clinical trials. "The technology makes it easy for people to report their
progress whilst on a new drug, for example," he added. "If you can
catch the disease early it will make a huge difference to care costs. It could
become a key technology in reducing the burden of care on the NHS."
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