Phonation Attributes and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Delineate the Progression of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS): A Neurodegenerative Disorder

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative illness affecting the motor neurons. The etiology of motor neuron degeneration is challenging to unveil. It is a complex disorder. The onset of this disease is so elusive that the symptoms are overlooked. The delayed prognosis results in the gradual progression of paralysis. This research explores several vocal features to suspect this disease from the voice signals unleashing artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. The significant signal processing based features are computed from the sustained phonation of vowel ‘/a/’ samples from healthy and ALS patients to detect this fatal disease. The successful formulation of feature matrix from the cepstral and acoustic domains is researched by designing several machine learning-based models. The designed system could achieve an excellent performance (100% accuracy) to recognize the ALS patients with an artificial neural network (ANN) based model.