ParkMAE: a cross-linguistic masked autoencoder framework for robust Parkinson’s disease detection from speech

We introduce ParkMAE, a robust multilingual speech foundation model and comprehensive benchmarking system for Parkinson's disease assessment. We curated multiple large-scale speech datasets comprising approximately 750 h of pretraining data and 100 h of evaluation data across four languages and diverse clinical populations. Our self-supervised masked autoencoder approach, pretrained on this multilingual corpus, demonstrates superior performance achieving 39% F1 score for cross-linguistic diagnosis, outperforming existing acoustic markers (eGeMAPS) by a significant margin and maintaining comparable performance to generic speech models (Whisper), while using 89% fewer parameters. Besides, ParkMAE shows exceptional generalizability to unseen languages without language-specific finetuning. Beyond diagnosis, we systematically evaluate medication state monitoring and disease staging tasks, revealing that despite promising literature reports, current publicly available datasets and speech-based approaches fail to reliably capture these clinical dimensions. For cognitive assessment (MoCA), our model demonstrated predictive capability (F1 = 0.56), suggesting potential for speech-based cognitive monitoring. This comprehensive evaluation establishes both the capabilities and current limitations of speech-based Parkinson's disease assessment, providing a reproducible framework for future clinical development.