Engineering Commons^™

Predicting Early Indicators Of Cognitive Decline From Verbal Utterances, Swati Padhee, Anurag Illendula, Megan Sadler, Valerie L. Shalin, Tanvi Banerjee, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, William Romine

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Dementia is a group of irreversible, chronic, and progressive neurodegenerative disorders resulting in impaired memory, communication, and thought processes. In recent years, clinical research advances in brain aging have focused on the earliest clinically detectable stage of incipient dementia, commonly known as mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Currently, these disorders are diagnosed using a manual analysis of neuropsychological examinations. We measure the feasibility of using the linguistic characteristics of verbal utterances elicited during neuropsychological exams of elderly subjects to distinguish between elderly control groups, people with MCI, people diagnosed with possible Alzheimer's disease (AD), and probable AD. We investigated the performance …