Background: The aim of this study is to use classification methods to predict future onset of Alzheimer's disease in cognitively normal subjects through automated linguistic analysis.
Methods: To study linguistic performance as an early biomarker of AD, we performed predictive modeling of future diagnosis of AD from a cognitively normal baseline of Framingham Heart Study participants. The linguistic variables were derived from written responses to the cookie-theft picture-description task. We compared the predictive performance of linguistic variables with clinical and neuropsychological variables. The study included 703 samples from 270 participants out of which a dataset consisting of a single sample from 80 participants was held out for testing. Half of the participants in the test set developed AD symptoms before 85 years old, while the other half did not. All samples in the test set were collected during the cognitively normal period (before MCI). The mean time to diagnosis of mild AD was 7.59 years.
Findings: Significant predictive power was obtained, with AUC of 0.74 and accuracy of 0.70 when using linguistic variables. The linguistic variables most relevant for predicting onset of AD have been identified in the literature as associated with cognitive decline in dementia.
Interpretation: The results suggest that language performance in naturalistic probes expose subtle early signs of progression to AD in advance of clinical diagnosis of impairment.
Funding: Pfizer, Inc. provided funding to obtain data from the Framingham Heart Study Consortium, and to support the involvement of IBM Research in the initial phase of the study. The data used in this study was supported by Framingham Heart Study's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute contract (N01-HC-25195), and by grants from the National Institute on Aging grants (R01-AG016495, R01-AG008122) and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R01-NS017950).
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2020.100583 | DOI Listing |
Radiother Oncol
January 2025
Department of Radiation Oncology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States. Electronic address:
Background And Purpose: Radiation therapy (RT) is highly effective, but its success depends on accurate, manual target delineation, which is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and prone to variability. Despite AI advancements in auto-contouring normal tissues, accurate RT target volume delineation remains challenging. This study presents Radformer, a novel visual language model that integrates text-rich clinical data with medical imaging for accurate automated RT target volume delineation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Acoust Soc Am
January 2025
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089-1455, USA.
Voice quality serves as a rich source of information about speakers, providing listeners with impressions of identity, emotional state, age, sex, reproductive fitness, and other biologically and socially salient characteristics. Understanding how this information is transmitted, accessed, and exploited requires knowledge of the psychoacoustic dimensions along which voices vary, an area that remains largely unexplored. Recent studies of English speakers have shown that two factors related to speaker size and arousal consistently emerge as the most important determinants of quality, regardless of who is speaking.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJMIR Med Inform
January 2025
Department of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States.
Background: Cohort studies contain rich clinical data across large and diverse patient populations and are a common source of observational data for clinical research. Because large scale cohort studies are both time and resource intensive, one alternative is to harmonize data from existing cohorts through multicohort studies. However, given differences in variable encoding, accurate variable harmonization is difficult.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBehav Res Methods
January 2025
Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, 650 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, MA, 01003, USA.
Eye tracking has been a popular methodology used to study the visual, cognitive, and linguistic processes underlying word recognition and sentence parsing during reading for several decades. However, the successful use of eye tracking requires researchers to make deliberate choices about how they apply this technique, and there is wide variability across labs and fields with respect to which choices are "standard." We aim to provide an easy-to-reference guideline that can help new researchers with their entrée into eye-tracking-while-reading research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Speech Lang Hear Res
January 2025
Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China.
Purpose: This study aims to examine the associations of phonological, lexical, and grammatical skills within and between languages in Mandarin-English bilingual preschoolers.
Method: Sixty-three Singaporean Mandarin-English bilingual children aged 3-5 years were assessed for articulation, receptive vocabulary, and receptive grammar using standardized instruments in English and compatible tools in Mandarin. Regression analyses were performed on each language outcome, with other language variables as predictors, controlling for age, nonverbal working memory, and home language environment.
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