Quantitative Assessment of Speech in Cerebellar Ataxia Using Magnitude and Phase Based Cepstrum

Abstract

The clinical assessment of speech abnormalities in Cerebellar Ataxia (CA) is time-consuming and inconsistent. We have developed an automated objective system to quantify CA severity and thereby facilitate remote monitoring and optimisation of therapeutic interventions. A quantitative acoustic assessment could prove to be a viable biomarker for this purpose. Our study explores the use of phase-based cepstral features extracted from the modified group delay function as a complement to the features obtained from the magnitude cepstrum. We selected a combination of 15 acoustic measurements using RELIEF feature selection algorithm during the feature optimisation process. These features were used ..